


Of Rings and Knighthood and Their Associated Misunderstandings

by ncfan



Series: Fictober 2019 [4]
Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: (as need be), (because Sylvain and Dorothea), (implicitly) - Freeform, Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Bechdel Test Pass, Blood, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Femslash, Femslash Big Bang, Femslash Big Bang Monthly Challenge, Fictober 2019, Gen, Gender Issues, Hopeful Ending, Knighthood, Misunderstandings, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Female Character, Pining, Studies the implications and fallout from Ingrid and Dorothea's paralogue, Trauma, also feat. Sylvain's intimacy issues, disturbing imagery, feat. Dorothea's intimacy issues, sexual innuendo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-29
Updated: 2019-12-03
Packaged: 2021-01-08 06:07:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 55,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21231041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: Ingrid and Dorothea misunderstand each other for five years. (Cultural differences, class differences, and intimacy issues can do that.) Sylvain tries to wingman. The results are... good. Eventually.





	1. Chapter One

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for Fictober 2019, prompt “I might just kiss you.” (In the last chapter.)
> 
> Okay, this was originally meant to be a oneshot, until it got to be way too long for that, and I decided to release it as a chapter fic instead. I’m planning for five chapters, and I’m currently in the latter scene of Chapter 4, so hopefully this should stay on schedule. Enjoy!
> 
> [**CN/TW**: Attempted kidnapping, forced marriage, and rape; sexism; restrictive/harmful gender norms; heteronormative culture (in that Ingrid is expected to marry a _man_, and marrying a woman is neither advised not particularly approved of); Ingrid’s own internalized disapproval of her own reactions to trauma]

_“Permission is not granted—ever. Just back off.”_

Sometimes, Ingrid thought she could hear the Goddess laughing at her. She was not as devout as the likes of Mercedes, but she had certainly paid attention during her religious instruction, and she had attended services in the chapel on the Galatea estate alongside her mother on every designated service day, barring illness. (There had been a time when this was about the only thing that could make her mother truly happy with her. Lady Edith found pinning down her husband or her sons a trial even on a good day, but her tomboyish daughter, more likely to be found playing in the mud of sparring against one of her brothers with a wooden training sword, could be put into a dress with no fuss when it was time for church services. Ingrid wouldn’t have shirked it, for multiple reasons.) Ingrid knew all the prayers said in eastern Faerghus by heart. She wasn’t the best singer in the world, but she knew all the hymns by heart, too. She was, she thought, properly observant and properly reverent.

And part of being properly reverent was holding to the belief that the Goddess was well above such displays as _laughing _at one of her followers. The Goddess had far more important things to worry about than chuckling at the situation one of her followers had gotten herself into, surely. Ingrid was not so unique in her situation that the goddess would take special notice her, surely.

And yet, Ingrid could still hear ghostly laughter echoing in her ears as she stared across the dining hall.

If it wasn’t the Goddess laughing at her, perhaps it was Seiros. Or maybe one of the Saints? Ingrid couldn’t decide which was more likely.

Someone, with some connection to the divine, was definitely laughing at her. Loudly.

“Hey, Ingrid, what’re you looking at?” Ingrid didn’t hear Sylvain ask as he sat down beside her at the table.

There was always some level of chatter at mealtimes that made it at least a little difficult to hear what was going on right next to you, even when you were perfectly attentive. Ingrid was not perfectly attentive, and thus, she didn’t realize Sylvain had come and sat down next to her until he jostled her shoulder.

Ingrid jumped a little, and turned to glare at Sylvain, who was… not apologetic, even, just looking a little bewildered. “I believe it’s considered customary to try to get someone’s attention _before _pushing them,” she didn’t quite snap at him. Oh, well; the glare still more than made up for the weakness of her voice.

Sylvain raised an eyebrow. “I… did try to get your attention. Wow, you must be _really _distracted by something, though.”

Trying not to let her face flush was a struggle. “What makes you say that?”

“You haven’t touched your food.” He waved his fork at her plate for emphasis. “It’s gotta be something _really _distracting if you’re willing to let your food cool before eating it.”

Before Ingrid could say anything to explain herself, before she could make any deflection that would have sent him sailing down the wrong track into safer waters, Sylvain looked to where Ingrid’s gaze had been directed. A huffing chuckle like wind battering against the side of a house jarred from his mouth. “Ferdinand? Didn’t think he was your type, Ingrid.”

Whether Ingrid would ever be able to fully forgive him for the images that flashed through her mind at that suggestion was a mystery she didn’t presently feel qualified to answer. But the prospect of those images being kept alive by the force of Sylvain’s teasing (it had been nearly three months before Sylvain had stopped ribbing Dimitri about that dagger, and then they had still been easily-distracted children; they weren’t really children anymore, Sylvain wasn’t as easily distracted as he used to be, and Ingrid did not relish the prospect of hearing about this regularly for the rest of the school year, and sporadically for years to come) was enough for Ingrid to take the risk, shake her head, and mutter, “That’s not who I was looking at.”

“What, Dorothea, then? Gotta admit, it _is _kinda funny watching those two go at it.” In between mouthfuls of stew, Sylvain waved his spoon back over towards where Dorothea and Ferdinand were, well, not quite _arguing, _but only because Ferdinand didn’t quite seem to grasp that that was what they were doing. “I never have understood how he can’t realize the way she’s looking at him. I don’t think I know a single woman who looks at a guy that way unless she’s deciding whether she wants to bash him over the head with a rock or just kick him in the balls until he passes out.”

Ingrid, for her part, kicked his shin under the table.

“Owww, what was that for?!”

Ingrid kicked him again. “This is a public place, you pervert.”

“Okay, okay, public place, now stop—“ his foot made abrupt, unfriendly contact with the side of her shin “—_kicking me_.”

They glowered at each other for a long moment, until it became clear that no further kicks were forthcoming, and Sylvain’s glare dropped from his face like the glitter of an early morning frost would disappear from the countryside in spring once the sun peeked its head up over the horizon. Ingrid could recall vividly, even now, how startling it had been to see such a thing for the first time. Felix’s bad moods could last him for days, and Glenn, though he’d been more even-tempered, had been much the same as him. Her mother didn’t truly calm down until the matter at hand had been talked out. Miklan was an absolute _beast _to deal with when he was angry (Not that either of Ingrid’s parents had allowed her to be around Miklan without adults present very often). After all her time around the lingering storm clouds they liked to stick their heads in, someone who could just turn his anger on and off like a faucet was jarring to her. But in this place, it felt almost normal—Garreg Mach was not a haven for the conventional.

Ingrid watched Sylvain rearrange his face, and she bit back a sigh he didn’t seem to hear as he leaned forward on one of his elbows. “Dorothea’s _interesting _to look at.”

Suddenly, kicking him in the shins again was seeming like a very attractive prospect. “Sylvain, don’t be crass.”

“I’m not being crass. I’m just _saying_…” He looked at her significantly, and Ingrid readied her foot. “You know they put on a play last night, right?” Ingrid lowered her foot. “Dorothea was the star; did you see it?”

Maybe her face wasn’t actually red. Maybe Garreg Mach was undergoing a sudden heat wave. “Yes.” And maybe Ingrid’s voice wasn’t quite as stiff as it had sounded to her own ears. “I saw it.”

“Hey, what’s with that face?” Damn. “Did Mercedes make you wear makeup, or something?”

_It wasn’t Mercedes. And I—_ “Or something,” Ingrid murmured. It was time to try and at least _try _to act like a normal human being, damn it. “So you saw the opera they put on. Did you like it?”

Sylvain shrugged. “Hey, it was something different. There’s not a whole lot to do around here, in case you haven’t noticed.”

Asides from make promises to girls he didn’t intend to keep, but that whole subject was cutting a little too close to Ingrid’s skin today for her comfort, so she didn’t comment on it. “Well, I enjoyed watching it. As you say, it was a nice change of pace. And…” Oh, Goddess, she hadn’t stumbled around words like this since she was twelve and had that six-month period where she got tongue-tied every time she tried to talk to Glenn. “…And the singing was quite nice.”

Then again, Dorothea’s voice had rendered all others mute to Ingrid’s ears, when she had heard it sound for the first time in song.

As if he could sense Ingrid’s thoughts, Sylvain snorted. “Well, Dorothea sounded pretty nice. I don’t know about the rest of them. Professor Manuela wasn’t in it, and Alois was, uh, yeah, I’m glad he didn’t have more stage time than he did. I don’t think my hearing would have recovered.”

“Hmm.” Sunlight peeked out from behind a passing cloud, turning Dorothea’s dark hair to burnished bronze. “I thought it was… I thought it was lovely.”

She had never heard Dorothea sing, before.

(And on second thought, Ingrid thought it was the Goddess laughing at her, after all.)

-0-0-0-

Avoiding Dorothea worked for a little while. Their studies were taking them in very different directions, and they rarely had out-of-class tutoring sessions or sparring practice at the same time. The only overlap was with sword practice, and even then, they were rarely scheduled to spar at the same time. Ingrid had given Dorothea her congratulations for a successful production, managing (somehow) not to blush as she did so, and after that, they just went about their lives again.

Dorothea hadn’t tried flirting again. Ingrid had, after all, been very clear, and for all that Dorothea seemed to live and breathe flirtation, she also seemed to understand what boundaries were. Ingrid had drawn the lines, and Dorothea was dutifully staying on the other side of them.

Pity there wasn’t any way to notify Dorothea that the lines had gotten scratched out while her back was turned.

It was just a crush. A stupid, stupid crush. Stupid because it _dared _rear its head not even a full day after Ingrid had insisted, vehemently even, that she wasn’t interested in Dorothea’s attentions towards her going any further than the strictly friendly. Stupid because it had birthed itself into this world despite Ingrid knowing full well that it wasn’t something she could ever really act upon. (She knew where her duty lied. She had had a lifetime to learn where her duty lied; she could hardly have forgotten it _now_. And Ingrid knew all about the arrangements certain nobles made with their spouses—or the arrangements they made without their spouse’s knowledge and/or blessing—but the prospect of ever enduring a marriage where such arrangements had been made was as vitriol upon her tongue. A man and a woman bound in matrimony pledged their fidelity to one another exclusively. Knight or bride, let no one say Ingrid was inconstant in her vows. She knew where her duty lied.)

It was just a crush. And certainly, Ingrid couldn’t remember ever getting as constantly red-faced thinking about Glenn as she did when she thought about Dorothea for more than a few moments at a time, couldn’t remember certain… other things she was currently experiencing, but she had been young when Glenn died. And Mercedes was firmly of the opinion (admittedly, it was an opinion Ingrid had heard aired from the table behind where Mercedes sat, most of the time), that everyone experienced moments of attraction for different people in different ways. Dorothea was… Ingrid couldn’t think of anyone less like Glenn, while still being a good person in their own right, than Dorothea. In personality, in mannerisms, in _appearance_, the two were like night and day. It made sense that her feelings would manifest themselves differently.

Fleeting it must be, nonetheless. Ingrid had drawn boundary lines, and Dorothea was dutifully staying on the other side of them. Once they left the Officers Academy, they’d likely never see each other again. Ingrid would go back home. Even if she was never able to become a knight, she would keep on training, for most domains within the Kingdom could benefit from a lady who could at least defend herself, and hold the castle in her husband’s absence. Dorothea would go back to Enbarr. She would marry a nobleman who fit her extraordinarily stringent standards (not a complaint; Ingrid knew enough about the way the world worked to be glad that those standards were so strict), and live out the rest of her days in contentment, as any good person deserved. Unless they took to sending each other letters—and while Ingrid did not know what kind of correspondent Dorothea was, she knew that her own facility with sparkling writing was limited—there was every chance they’d never hear from each other again.

Given time, it would fade. And in the meantime, Ingrid would squirm, try not to think about Dorothea overmuch, and try not to let this stupid, _stupid _crush overrun her life.

(Her father had allowed her to attend the Officers Academy partly because he knew her to be capable of excelling in this environment. But part of it, she knew, the larger part, was because it was about the best opportunity she’d have to meet young men her own age whom he considered worthy of her, and whom she didn’t consider to be practically her own brothers. The thought of his reaction if he found out that the only person she’d considered for even a moment was another girl, well. Ingrid wasn’t sure if he’d laugh or despair. Maybe both, a despairing laugh? It was difficult to say.)

Well, Ingrid had _thought _it would fade. A particularly odious suitor, a failed kidnapping, and a trip to the _Valley of Torment_, of all places, shook Ingrid’s resolve severely on that point.

_“You _can _cry, you know.”_

_Dorothea’s normally sparkling eyes were soft as she stared into Ingrid’s face. They had left the blistering, expiating heat of Ailell behind them, but Dorothea had sweated clean through her clothes in the hour or so they had spent there, and her hair clung to her face and her neck in sodden lumps._

_Ingrid had been sweating, too, and the sour reek in her nostrils made her head swim too much for her to effect an entirely even tone as she replied, “Why would I be crying?”_

_They were all on their way back to Ingrid’s home. Ingrid would stay there long enough to apprise her father of what had happened, what they had learned of her would-be betrothed _before _he had tried to— She put that particular thought from her mind. Meanwhile, the rest of them would make their way back to Garreg Mach; the school year wasn’t going to stop for them._

_Just a few more miles, now. The desolate landscape of the lands surrounding Ailell had given way to the pine barrens Ingrid had known from her earliest days, and just a few more hills crested, and she’d see the walls looming up in the night. Ingrid had never been so relieved at the prospect of returning home in her life. She wanted to see her parents again. She… Her thoughts kept swimming in the heat-addled soup of her mind, and each time she tried to grasp one, it squirmed out of her grip and raced away, leaving her with an ocean of sour sweat that stank of salt and rancid water._

_She ought to be stronger than this. Knight or lady, she ought to be stronger than this. If she had been allowed to fall to the back of the group, it might have been easier to gather her thoughts and hold them long enough for them to become something identifiable. But Professor Melusine was adamant that Ingrid never be out of sight of their companions—and it had taken some doing to convince her that the complement of guards Ingrid’s father was likely to assign to escort her back to the monastery was sufficient for her protection, and that _no_, Professor Melusine did not need to shadow her every step of the way. Thus, Ingrid was stuck in the middle of the group, with at least four pairs of eyes on her at any given time, and oh, it was _not _easy to gather her thoughts like this_.

_She ought to be stronger than this. Why was it so hard to keep from shaking as she walked?_

_Dorothea set a gentle hand on her arm. The urge to shake suddenly rose tenfold. “Ingrid…” She rubbed her thumb across a small patch of clothed skin on Ingrid’s forearm. Ingrid shivered a little, and told herself it was the night chill after the miserable presage of the eternal flames that was Ailell. “A man who meant to marry you just tried to have you _abducted_.” Dorothea’s face screwed up, a contortion Ingrid didn’t think she’d ever before seen on those carefully controlled features. “I’ve survived a kidnapping attempt or three. They’re not…” Her voice dropped, low and faltering. “…fun.”_

_Ingrid’s stomach lurched, the sharp pang radiating all the way up to her throat. She swallowed thickly. “I…… Thank you for your concern, Dorothea. But I am quite well.”_

For her own sake, Ingrid did not spend too much time speculating on what her life, married to that man, would have been like. Better to just leave it alone, and consign it to the corners of her dreams that it already loved to haunt. But what she couldn’t ignore was the part Dorothea had played in ensuring that his wrongdoings were brought to light in the first place.

_She really did stick her neck out for me, didn’t she?_

_If _that _is the sort of man who typically tries to woo pretty opera singers, I shudder to think of what Dorothea had to deal with when she was performing with the Mittelfrank Opera Company._

_I…_

_I didn’t think I still—_

Ingrid’s hands reached for her jewelry box practically of their own accord. She didn’t have much. Most people outside of the nobility (and even some people within the nobility) didn’t understand that poverty could afflict the nobility just as it could the commoners of Fódlan. That poverty often took different forms than what a commoner might experience, but many aspects of it were just the same, regardless of someone’s social class. Ingrid’s jewelry box was not overflowing with pieces, and those pieces she did possess were largely plain, and humbler than some might have expected of a noblewoman’s jewelry collection.

If she had ever possessed much desire for jewelry, she suspected her parents would have accommodated her. Her father would have wanted to make her happy (And help her find something dazzling, something that could lure someone else in). Her mother would have been thrilled that Ingrid was finally showing interest in something a proper lady was supposed to show interest in. They would have accommodated her, even knowing that it would be a strain on the family’s finances. But Ingrid had never possessed much desire for jewelry, and even if she had, she had known, always known (her parents weren’t as good at hiding the state of affairs in their ledgers as they thought they were) what it would do to the family finances, so she had never asked for it.

It didn’t take Ingrid much time to go through all of her jewelry, and decide that pretty much none of it looked like it would be to Dorothea’s tastes. All of her jewelry looked _so _different from everything Ingrid had been accustomed to seeing back in Faerghus, and it was bold and bright, clearly meant to catch attention and hold it there. Next to that, though Ingrid just had to look at her jewelry _once _to know it was better-made and higher-quality, it still all looked so hopelessly drab.

She’d wanted this to be a reasoned decision. She wanted it to be the result of careful deliberation. Ingrid would up picking the ring she had on impulse instead.

-0-0-0-

“You gave her a _ring_?! You seriously gave her a _ring_?!”

And when Ingrid stopped to think about it for even half a second, she thought that maybe her impulsive choice hadn’t been so wise, after all.

(It stung. She’d never been in a position to be rejected, before. She had not expected it to sting so badly.)

Ingrid sat at her desk, nursing her head and trying to resist the urge to try and see if she could melt Sylvain’s head off of his shoulders with the force of her gaze alone. “Sylvain, I’m really not in the mood for this,” and maybe the edge sharpening her voice to something like a knife blade would be enough to take the place of a deathly gaze.

Or not, since Sylvain didn’t seem to grasp at _any _of the danger he might potentially find himself in. Instead, he’d made himself right at home on the edge of her bed, kicking one of his heels against the bedframe and shaking with poorly restrained laughter. “Well, _I’m _in the mood for it. This has gotta be some kind of record; I never thought I’d meet someone worse at giving gifts than his Highness, but you went sailing above and _beyond_ the standard he’s set.”

“Sylvain…”

He snorted. “You’re lucky your father’s not around to know what you did. I can just see what he’d make of that. And _wow_, now I’m thinking of what our classmates would make of this. Mercedes would never let you live this down, you know, not if she found out she could be teasing you about how you gave—“

“That’s enough, Sylvain!” Ingrid snapped, turning a ferocious scowl on him. Her skin didn’t feel like it fit right on her muscles, her head felt like it was about to split open and spill fire across her face, and he seriously wanted to _joke_?

“You gotta admit—“ Sylvain leaned back on the bed, just far enough back that they could still make eye contact, and oh, he had never been good at reading anger, especially not in a woman’s face “—it is kinda funny, you giving Dorothea a _ring_.”

“It isn’t funny.”

“You’re taking this really personally.”

“It isn’t funny.” Ingrid’s mother had always told her that a lady should convey her displeasure with a certain chilly decorum. Something that not even the strictest headmistress of the strictest finishing school could find fault with, while capable of freezing the malcontent it was aimed at to the spot with the force of an arctic gale. The glare ought to make its recipient _feel _as if they had been transported to the depths of the harshest, darkest winter, and dropped into a snowdrift naked. Ingrid… had never quite managed to achieve a glare as chilly as all that, but she did her best. And Sylvain finally seemed to be taking notice of her best. “She didn’t take the ring. Didn’t want a ring if it was being given to her by another girl, I would imagine.”

She had no right. She knew that. There were no promises she could make Dorothea that would survive her homecoming. The impulsive gesture might have had truth in it, but it was just that: impulsive, and unwise. If either of her parents ever learned of it, Ingrid knew she’d be in for a tongue-lashing regarding breaches of propriety and the stains on reputation that could arise from them.

(Ingrid knew why her father had such a hard time finding suitors for her who didn’t turn out to be like… She knew why her father had such a hard time finding reputable men willing to marry her. It went beyond their family’s lack of wealth, the poor quality of their lands, the fact that their house was a fairly new one, a mere offshoot of an older one. Glenn had been possible only because he had no Crest of his own and Ingrid was, as poor of a catch as she’d been on her own, a better catch than he was likely to get otherwise. She made a poor prospective wife for the established noble houses, for reasons that went beyond insufficient dowry or the newness of their house. She knew that. She did not wish to add to her parents’ burdens.)

Logically, Ingrid knew it to be good fortune for her that Dorothea had refused the ring. No potential stain on the reputation of House Galatea, and no awkward questions for Dorothea when people saw her wearing it, no stain on _her _reputation, either. But it just…

It stung. The flippancy with which she refused it, the fact that she gave it to _Professor Melusine _instead of giving it back to Ingrid when she made clear she didn’t want it, all of that sunk under Ingrid’s skin like splinters. She didn’t think she could find them all before they started to fester.

_So I jilted her, and she jilted me in turn. I did not think she would do it so sharply._

Finally, _finally_, the smile on Sylvain’s face was starting to give way to the ragged beginnings of unease. "Hey, umm, Ingrid?” He licked his lips, as if trying to taste the quality of the air, before going on to ask, “Where’d you get that ring? The jeweler in town?”

He’d laugh at her again. She knew he would. Oh, he who made so many promises he had no intention of ever keeping, _he _had never been so foolish as to do what she had done, never been foolish enough to do anything that might compromise the virtue of anyone but the girl he’d seduced. (It always shocked Ingrid, how easily Sylvain walked away untouched from the wreckage of his latest conquest’s reputation, without so much as the smallest stain upon him. Unwise, they called him, foolhardy and flippant, they called him, and girls who actually knew what he was like tended to shy away or otherwise rebuff any advances, but Ingrid had heard his castoffs called whores and worse.)

He was going to laugh, but you know what, Ingrid was reasonably certain that he wouldn’t _tell _anyone about it. She’d kept enough of his secrets by now to know that she could, at the very least, expect reciprocation on this point.

Okay. She could deal with laughter.

“No.” Not that she could quite stand looking at him while he geared up to laugh. Ingrid stared down at the hands she’d laid in her lap as she explained it. “It… It’s the goddess ring my granny gave me when I turned twelve.”

In place of the laughter Ingrid had been expecting, the air stretched out in silence fit to choke the air from her lungs. When finally curiosity burned the mortification out of her enough that she could look up, there was not a trace of laughter to be found in Sylvain’s face. Instead, he was looking at her with an expression he normally reserved for the times his soon-to-be-castoff lovers tried to persuade him to stay by telling them they loved him. “Uhhh…” The laughter she’d expected finally arrived, but the nervous jitter was a far cry from the barking laughs she had expected. “A ring your grandmother gave you. The grandmother I hit on when I was eight. _That _grandmother?”

Fires of Ailell, her head was throbbing now. “Yes, Sylvain. My sweet, sweet granny, whom you hit on when you were eight. _That _granny.”

Another high-pitched jitter (_that _was a noise Ingrid hadn’t heard him make since his voice was still breaking) escaped Sylvain’s mouth. “Well, you… You…” He ran a hand through his hair. “…I mean, you said she wouldn’t accept the ring. So you’ve got it now, don’t you?”

Fires of Ailell, she felt like her skin was about to burst open and spill brimstone to the floor. “_No_. She gave it to Professor Melusine. “’For safekeeping,’ she said.”

Judging by the way Sylvain’s eyes kept darting across Ingrid’s face, Ingrid’s desk, and the whole room, genuine laughter wasn’t going to be forthcoming tonight. Ingrid would have to learn to be grateful for small mercies. “Uhh, Ingrid? You need to go get that back. Like, right now.”

“_No.”_

“But it was your grandmother’s.”

A fact that was hardly going to be lost upon _Ingrid_. The knowledge that she was being childish was hardly lost on her, either. But she couldn’t quite bear it.

Professor Melusine, if it was explained to her, would never breathe the explanation Ingrid gave her to another soul. Ingrid didn’t even have to know the woman all that well to know that; she was quite possibly the most close-mouthed person Ingrid had ever met in her life. And over the amount of time Ingrid had come to know her, she had learned that her professor’s attitudes towards, well, everything relevant to this discussion were not quite what could be considered conventional. She’d never say a word about it to anyone else, and the worst that would happen would be that she’d think Ingrid more impulsive than she had before.

She couldn’t do it.

“I… can’t.” Ingrid clapped her hands down onto her thighs. “I don’t want to talk about it. I just can’t. Call it pride, say your impulsiveness rubbed off on me and I’m not willing to bruise my pride just to get the ring back.” She lifted her hands briefly, only to clap them back down again. “I just want to be done.”

_Give it time_, she thought to herself. Give it time, and the bruise, the burn, the gash, or whatever it was, would fade, or close up, and hopefully it wouldn’t fester before that happened. Give it time, and maybe it wouldn’t sting and prick and make her feel like her skin was going to split open. (Give it time, and maybe the memories of Ailell would fade. Funny, how she kept thinking of Dorothea and Ailell at the same time.)

Give it time.

She hoped.

Ingrid nodded to herself, sucking a deep breath in. (It didn’t steady her. If anything, it made her feel unsteady.) “Alright. I need to go train before it gets too dark.” When she rose up to her feet, just for a moment, the world spun. The look she turned on Sylvain, she couldn’t decide whether to make it a smile or a frown, and didn’t like to think of what the mirror would have shown her of the result. “And I _know _you need to go study.”

-0-0-0-

Normally, training was to Ingrid what meditation was to the monk. It calmed her mind of what otherwise might plague it. Going through her routines with a training lance or sword meant she didn’t have to think about upcoming assignments. Didn’t have to think about her father trying to find her yet another suitor. Didn’t have to think about Sylvain’s recklessness, or Felix’s refusal to apply himself to those areas of study Ingrid knew he could have excelled in if he would just _try_. Didn’t have to think about Mercedes’s vile adoptive father, or of finding Ashe pale and silent in the cathedral again, or of what little Bernadetta had told her of how she had come to be at the monastery, and _why_.

_My father—_

The prickling burn of long exercise was soothing to her. Normally.

It gave her no relief tonight. Tonight, Ingrid’s nose was fully of the phantom reek of brimstone (her mother had taken one look at the clothes she had been wearing in the valley, and declared they would have to be burned), and she wondered for what felt like the thousandth time if she would ever be free of it. How many baths did she need to get it off of her skin, out of her hair? How many more days before she stopped remembering it suddenly, at odd moments?

She tried to think of more pleasant things, and all she got was the disconcerting sight of full, delicately-curved lips.

Somehow, Ingrid was not having the easiest time concentrating, tonight.

In the dark, she dreams. In the darkness of dreams, all things put out of sight of the day are ascendant.

In her dreams, Ingrid is snow, and bleeds icy water the wolves all drink from greedily, until one of them thinks better of settling for the water and leaps up to savage her until her snow-flesh is scattered and the pack descends to devour it all.

In her dreams, there is a woman with a glowing coal for a tongue, and she sings with a voice of smoke and flame until the fire spreads from her tongue and she is burning, oh, her death-song is a wound upon the dark, oh.

In her dreams, Ingrid sees herself, a faded, trammeled thing, body broken by too many births and will broken by long confinement, not a knight, not a lady, just a broken vessel for someone else’s desires, something to be hollowed out so someone else can pour their will inside. This thing that is her yet spiritless crawls limply along the earth, its broken, naked body cut deep with the jagged stones that line the unforgiving soil of the mountains, and oh, how she hates that they still have the same _eyes_.

It was a couple of days before people stopped asking Ingrid why she looked so pale in the mornings.

-0-0-0-

But life wasn’t going to stop moving on account of Ingrid’s own disquiet. That was a lesson she had learned some four years ago, and one she remembered too keenly to allow herself to be paralyzed again. She was a student at the Officers Academy, and she had her duties.

“I really wish you’d be more careful when we’re fighting.”

And the world wasn’t going to let her hide from those she might have wished to avoid, not so easily. (A knight did not balk in times like these. A lady would not have shirked her duties, no matter how onerous. It seemed Ingrid really was failing at both. Time to do better.)

The forests outside of Garreg Mach had been drenched for the past several days in a cold drizzle that so dampened the undergrowth that it was hard to tell when enemies were approaching, if they exercised but the smallest amount of caution. An ambush while they were doing field exercises had, in retrospect, been all but inevitable—Ingrid had overheard Catherine and Shamir muttering about just _how _bad this year had been in regards to all the bandits buzzing around Garreg Mach, and oh, she remembered just how bad the first two years following King Lambert’s death had been, but she had let down her guard regardless, and had a bloody arm now to show for it.

Little water droplets dripped down from the pine needles and what dead leaves still clung to the branches of deciduous trees, glistening like beads of pure, untainted glass in Dorothea’s hair. Said hair lung limply now, saturated as it was by earlier rain, fresh rain, the sheer _humidity _(the thing about living so close to Ailell was that the fires sapped moisture from the air for tens of miles around; to have the slightest understanding of what humidity was like, you had to travel a fair distance away from Ingrid’s home to find it), but it shone in the faint light that slipped out from behind the pewter clouds overhead. Not the bronze it seemed in warm sunlight, but with a cool, dark light, just a few shades off from ebony.

Humid cold seeped through everything out here, but Dorothea’s hands were warm and gentle as she held Ingrid’s arm steady, the light pouring from her left hand like moonlight over snow. She was just… Ingrid had never known someone so able to…

She did not know what to do with this détente at all.

(For now, courtesy was what she owed. Rejection was snarled up in far too many other things, and even were it not, courtesy was what she owed to anyone in this world, unless they did something that went utterly beyond the pale. Ingrid did not rate her own feelings so highly as to count rejection there.)

“Thank you for your concern—“ Ingrid couldn’t quite meet Dorothea’s eyes (weak, weak), instead focusing her gaze on the long, crooked gash Dorothea currently plied healing magic to “—but really, it isn’t necessary.”

Ingrid didn’t have to look up to know what sort of look Dorothea was shooting her way. She could feel it boring into the side of her head. “You could have died from an injury like this, you know?” she said, very softly. “You came _this _close to nicking an artery—I may not be an expert on anatomy yet, but I _am _paying attention to Professor Manuela’s lessons; I know how bad that is. A wound like that would just bleed and bleed and bleed, and if no one closed it up, you’d bleed until you just…” Her voice quavered, and Ingrid hated, really hated, the way her heart seized at the sound. “…can’t bleed anymore.”

For her own part, Ingrid wondered if that was really the way these sorts of wounds operated. (She tried not to think of other wounds a woman could suffer that would just bleed and bleed and bleed.) She wasn’t an expert on human anatomy, either. But that wasn’t really the point, was it?

“But I was never in any real danger, was I?” Her voice was soft now, too, and she had not meant it, and would spend the rest of the conversation struggling to ratchet it back up to normal volume. “There were plenty of healers on the field. Mercedes and Linhardt were here—and there was you.”

A little giggle, a discordant sound like someone trying to blow air the wrong way through a flute, shuddered against Ingrid’s ears. “Oh, Ingrid. You’d make a wonderful opera heroine. I’ve sung in a production or two with stalwart lady knights in them—so steadfast, so dashing, so graceful.” Suddenly, Ingrid was glad for the cold damp; it made it harder for her face to go hot. “But that’s not—“ the hand poised over Ingrid’s arm, skin turned to silvery ice by the light of her own magic, began to quiver. “—That isn’t how the world works. You get no points for chivalry in a world where everyone identifies that as your _weak _spot.”

Later, when they made it back to the monastery and Ingrid was passed over to Professor Manuela’s care, Dorothea would bring up Ingrid’s long pause and use it as evidence that she was in danger of going into shock, point to it and say that Ingrid should spend the night in the infirmary, just so someone was on hand in case her wounds reopened or her condition deteriorated. In those dark, largely sleepless hours in the infirmary, Ingrid would curse, many times over, her own attempt to gather her thoughts in this present moment. It would have been much easier for her to gather her thoughts later if she could have done it in the privacy of her own room.

As it stood, Ingrid finally looked up from her watch of Dorothea’s hand, and into the face of the girl herself, and for a long time, she was silent. Dorothea’s brow was already knit with concern, and as the silence dragged on, those lines in her forehead only carved themselves deeper. She might have murmured something, but all Ingrid could hear was the rushing of the cold winds in her ears.

“I… do not regard it as a weak point.” It was important to keep a steady, neutral tone. It was important not to turn this into an argument, when there was still so much that Ingrid did not know. (She didn’t want—) A misunderstanding, surely that was what this was. “The code of chivalry is the backbone of a knight’s ideals. Without them, I don’t really know that there’s anything separating us from common bandits.” Her eyes strayed to a corpse lying some twenty feet away from them. “They’re worth living for.”

Were the world a more merciful place, if the Goddess had not taken such an interest in laughing at Ingrid, the conversation would likely have ended there. Just a jarring moment to rap at the back of Ingrid’s mind for the next few days, until she finally managed to put it to bed. She’d certainly had enough of _those _lately; it’d be right at home amongst the growing crowd.

The Goddess loved to laugh at her. (Maybe if Ingrid hadn’t picked a ring dedicated to her…) Dorothea raised one well-groomed, sharply-curved eyebrow. “I know all about things worth living for—“ and it seemed the only concession the Goddess was willing to make in-between her gales of laughter was the hesitancy in Dorothea’s voice “—trust me, I hear about that all the time. But I know other things about knights, too.” A frown jerked at the corners of her red mouth. “Things like dying in someone else’s name.”

Glenn’s armor flashed through Ingrid’s mind. How bright it had been the day he was knighted, and the bloodied, mangled wreck Felix had reluctantly described to her after she’d pressed him. She couldn’t really see Dorothea as she said, “If necessary, yes.” Just an empty suit of armor. “A knight pledges their life to their liege lord. If necessary, they would sacrifice it. Without regret.”

“And if that liege lord was unworthy of their knight’s loyalty?”

Not something that came up a lot in the tales Ingrid read, growing up. The villains of those tales all tended to be, well, they weren’t people you spent a lot of time speculating about. There wasn’t enough to them to allow for much speculation about their motivations or the inner workings of their minds. It came up sometimes in the training Ingrid’s second-oldest brother underwent, and even then, just to train Marcel in what qualities he ought to _avoid _in a liege lord.

Ingrid had never thought much about it, either. (She’d had no reason to, as of yet.)

“A knight swears their fealty to their liege lord. That involves their obedience. Whether my liege lord was…” Ingrid shrugged, and instantly regretted it when a stabbing pain shot up her arm. “It doesn’t matter what sort of person my liege lord turns out to be, if I’m a knight sworn to them. There is no greater dishonor than to be foresworn.”

How many knights had chosen death over dishonor in Duscur? Ingrid could well imagine the opprobrium that would have been theirs if they had fled the battlefield instead of staying—and dying—to protect the royal family. (Felix twitched and muttered and snapped, and they—Ingrid did not think they’d ever reach an accord. Whenever they tried to talk about it, they just wound up yelling at each other. _“I’d rather have my brother, living and dishonored, than the broken armor they pulled out of that charnel pit,” _he’d snarled maybe six months after it had happened, voice cracking, and they did not— No, they did not talk about that.)

When Lord Lonato had raised his rebellion, all his household knights, all the knights sworn to the land he called his, had joined him without a second thought. He had been… For Ashe’s sake, there were many things Ingrid could not, would not say. She had expected no less of his knights. Lord Lonato had been a paragon of chivalry, once, and though grief had driven him off the righteous path, he had trained his knights well.

Dorothea regarded Ingrid in silence for a long moment, her expression unreadable. And then, as if she’d just tossed aside one mask in favor of another, she shrugged, far better at making the action seem flippant than Ingrid ever could. “I mean, if you actually believe that kind of thing, then yeah, I guess it _is _pretty bad to be foresworn.” She ducked her head, lips quirking in an expression that was difficult to describe, except to say that whatever it was, it was _not _a smile. Water beads slid smoothly down her forehead, streaking her cheeks in delicate, glistening lines. “But as far as I can see, there are _much _worse things in this world than breaking a promise.”

For the rest of the time between Dorothea’s healing of her arm and the other, more minor injuries littered across Ingrid’s body, and Professor Melusine calling for them to head back to the monastery, Ingrid was silent. Just as well that Dorothea didn’t try to engage her again in conversation, for Ingrid’s throat was shut against speech, and her ears shut against hearing it.

_“Protect Ingrid! Don’t let anyone get near her!”_

Ingrid’s ears throbbed with the rhythmic roar of her own pulse.

_Funny, I—_

Bitterness flooded her mouth, coating her tongue in something that burned like vitriol. _I thought you were like me._


	2. Chapter Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [**CN/TW**: Ingrid’s internalized disapproval of her own reactions to trauma]

The school year kept on rocketing towards a violent close, and oh, Ingrid did not know how she had managed to miss the fires of war being stoked to a white heat, but once her eyes were opened, she could only struggled not to choke upon war’s acrid smoke. Thanks to these devouring flames, Ingrid had not, strictly speaking, actually graduated from the Officers Academy. But under the circumstances, her father said, pulling her forward into a relieved embrace when she made her way back home, no one was going to hold it against her.

(Dorothea had… Ingrid did not know exactly where Dorothea had gone. Back to Enbarr, most like, back to the glittering—and shadowy—world she had shone so brightly in before. They would not meet again, most like. Perhaps that was for the best. They did not— They could not— It was for the best.)

War unfurled across Faerghus as if Ailell had burst its banks, as if the Goddess now directed her fury against the kingdom entire. (Ingrid would think about the Goddess’s wrath, later on. She’d be thinking about it a lot.)

Dimitri was—

Her father insisted that, so long as Cornelia did not deign to put his corpse on display, they could not know for sure that Dimitri was dead, and that Cornelia’s refusal to produce his corpse was as good as an admission that he yet lived, and had slipped her dragnets. Then where _was _he? her mother would retort in turn. If the prince yet lived, why had he not resurfaced? It had been weeks, there had been no sightings, and Cornelia certainly didn’t _act _as you would expect her to, if she believed that a dire threat to her rule over Faerghus yet lived.

Ingrid found herself in the chapel on her family’s estate more often than usual, once she came home. It was quiet, there, in between church services, and she—

She did not know what to think, she really didn’t. Dimitri and Dedue would have been together in Fhirdiad when the regent turned up dead, and neither of them were what Ingrid would call easily killed.

_But I didn’t think the professor easily killed, and yet she— _Ingrid did not think about how long Professor Melusine must have fallen. She did not think about what had waited at the end of that long drop. She had grown up on tales of what happened to pegasus riders who had their mounts shot out from under them.

How had the story gone?

Oh, yes.

Fraldarius was a mighty warrior of old, and no man could withstand her. What could fell such a mighty warrior? Not a king, not an army, not a sea of foes. Not swords, not axes, not lances. Not cold, not heat, not storm, not lightning. Not the ravages of time.

What could fell Fraldarius?

A single arrow was what could fell Fraldarius.

Fraldarius fell and fell and fell, and her blessed shield could not spare her the earth’s unyielding embrace. Her screams echo still in the mountain, the phantom of things long past.

Ingrid did not think about long drops.

Neither Dimitri nor Dedue were the sort to go to their deaths easily. And yet, neither of them had resurfaced anywhere in Fhirdiad or anywhere outside of it since Dimitri had purportedly been executed. There was no word of Dimitri seeking sanctuary with the now-roving Knights of Seiros, no word of him trying to rally the still-loyal houses to oust Cornelia and eject the Empire from Faerghus. Not a trace, not a whisper, not the slightest sliver of evidence amounting to their continued existence.

Alone in the chapel, in the company of silent candles, Ingrid said a few prayers. First for Dimitri, then for Dedue, which surprised her at first, but when she thought about it, it no longer surprised her at all. She had been wrong. (She had been wrong about so many things.) She would pray. Prayers for the soul of one departed man were, now, the only means she had of begging clemency for her own.

The Goddess had found her voice of rage, and blood soaked the land as the monsoons of the rainy season soaked the Empire. It was…

She should not pray for killing, or seek it out, but Ingrid found the specter of war oddly exhilarating. At the prospect of battle, she was as giddy as if someone had replaced all the blood in her body with wine.

She had not long to taste it.

“Ingrid?” She opened her chamber door to reveal Marcel standing there. He looked slightly winded, as if he’d been running for some time. “Mother and Father want to see you. They’re in the solar; Mother says to come immediately.”

With a frown, Ingrid asked, “Did they say why?” It must have been something unusual, if they were sending one of her brothers to fetch her instead of one of them coming to her door themselves.

Marcel could only shrug. “They didn’t say. Mother’s fit to leave the ground, though; you didn’t get sword oil on one of her gowns again, did you?”

Ingrid rolled her eyes. “I haven’t done that since I was twelve, and you know it. Alright, thank you for telling me, Marcel.”

Her father’s solar was on the other side of the main house from the family’s chambers—not the typical place to put it, but even when House Galatea was new, they’d not had much money, and the solar had once been an audience chamber. As Ingrid traversed a well-worn path between her chamber and that solar, something hard and cold fell, squirming, into her stomach. There were so many things a hastily-convened meeting with her parents could mean, especially when coupled with her mother falling into a state of agitation, but one singular topic kept bobbing to the forefront of her mind.

_I’m not ready_.

She wasn’t ready to field another suitor. She knew it was her duty, knew marriage to a wealthy man was possibly the only thing that could pull her house back from the brink. Things being what they were, the chances of one of her brothers being able to attract girls with large dowries were slim to none. The only way was if she did it, if she let her body be a vessel for someone’s dreams of a Crest in their bloodline, but oh, she wasn’t ready, she didn’t want to be hollowed out—

Here was the door to the solar, stood slightly ajar. Ingrid was not ready for that, either.

The world wouldn’t wait while she faltered. Ingrid took a breath that steadied her not at all, and stepped inside.

Most of Ingrid’s earliest memories involved this solar. Crawling under the furniture with Marcel and Felix when they were playing hide and seek with Glenn and Ingrid’s oldest brother, Séverin. Being mesmerized by the rhythmic motions of her mother’s steady hands as she worked at her loom or played her mandolin. Her father taking one of his books down off of the bookshelves to read to her. Roasting walnuts on the fire in winter, gazing up in wonder at the tapestries that adorned the plain pine wood paneling, trying to guess at what they all depicted when she was still so young that she couldn’t even make sense of all of the shapes. Pushing the furniture just close enough that if she threw a sheet over one, it would settle over the other like a tent, then crawling in with her Schirmer cousins and sleeping there until daybreak.

Ingrid was older now, and she could see the solar in a different light—indeed, once the stars of childhood had been stripped from her eyes, it was hard to see anything else. The room’s only two windows were poorly-positioned, so that then, even on a summer’s day, the room was poorly lit, necessitating the constant burning of candles (It had been quite the revelation to look at the ledgers and see how much they spent on candles a year). The tapestries were faded and threadbare, some of them moth-eaten, and they were insufficient to hide the old, worm-eaten holes that pocked the pine paneling on the walls. Many of the floorboards were cracked and splintered. The repairs that would have been needed to make the solar shine again were deemed frivolous and unattainable in comparison to what the household actually needed to survive.

Happy memories of childhood were not obliterated. Just… tarnished, a bit. And right now, well out of reach.

Ingrid found her father sitting at the table closest to the lit hearth, nursing his head in his hand, and her mother pacing the floor like a caged lion, her dark blue skirt swirling against her legs like smoke. For a long moment, neither of them registered Ingrid’s presence.

Then, Mother’s eyes fell upon her. Her face was waxen, a vein twitching in her jaw. “Ingrid, close the door behind you, and sit down. There is something you must know.”

As far as shutting the door went, Ingrid did as she was told. But her hand lingered on the handle, and her hand began to shake, and this was so, so childish, but the words came tumbling from her lips: “Please, I’m not ready to hear out another suitor, I’m sorry, I know I should, but I’m not ready, I’m not ready, I’m not…”

By the time her voice petered out to nothing, her parents were staring at each other in frank confusion strong enough to break past their obvious agitation. And still, after her voice had fled her (shame, maybe? Her weakness could shame a worm), her lips kept forming the voiceless words, a prayer for a Goddess too preoccupied by the task of unleashing Ailell on the rest of the world to even take a moment to laugh at her. Ingrid’s heart was a drum, beating a furious tattoo against her ribs.

And then, the spell of silence was broken, and Mother’s face fell, as Father at the same time rose from his chair.

“Oh, my dear,” Mother muttered, pressing her fingertips to her brow.

“Ingrid.” Father’s voice was very gentle, and in his eyes, there was something Ingrid could never remember seeing there before. She didn’t know quite what it was, but those bright, darting eyes made her profoundly uneasy, nonetheless. “I promise you, we haven’t been looking for another suitor for you. After what happened while you were in school…” He paused, running a hand through his auburn hair with a heavy sigh, and this time, there was no mistaking the shame she watched crawl over his face. “…Your mother and I thought it best to wait a while, before we tried again.”

Mother closed the distance between them, sliding her arm across Ingrid’s shoulders. “Come sit down, my dear.” Ingrid couldn’t recall her mother calling her ‘my dear’ so much since Ingrid had come down with pneumonia when she was ten. “As I said, there is something you must know.”

All the way to the bench that sat opposite from Father’s chair, Mother didn’t relinquish her grip on Ingrid’s shoulders. Even when they sat down, there Mother’s arm stayed, and this action, less characteristic than the murmured ‘my dears’, kept Ingrid tense, even as her father smiled weakly at her.

“I…” Father licked his lips, gesturing to the scattered papers and books lying out on the table. After a moment, he drew himself up, sitting as ramrod straight as the slightly slanted back of his chair would allow. “I think it would be easier to explain if you—“ he picked up a scroll of parchment, dark red wax seal still clinging to one of the ends “—read this yourself.”

Bewildered, Ingrid took the scroll from his hands. When she saw the seal, she thought she might be beginning to understand: the coat of arms on the seal was the two-headed eagle, quartered with a rearing lion. It had been less than two months, but she’d had enough time to take to heart what the new coat of arms of the ‘Faerghus Dukedom’ looked like. House Galatea’s position was not so secure as Houses Gautier or Fraldarius. The most fertile farmlands of the Kingdom were firmly located in occupied territory, and House Galatea could not afford to openly court war with Cornelia and her Imperial collaborators. So, yes, they did receive semi-regular scrolls from the current government occupying Fhirdiad.

Ingrid rolled the scroll open, and she understood the situation in full.

_Salutations to Count Raymond Galatea and Countess Edith, from Duchess Cornelia Arnim in Fhirdiad,_

_I thank you most humbly for your continued cooperation. Her Majesty, the Emperor Edelgard Hresvelg, prays for a speedy conclusion to affairs in this theater of war, as do I. As of yet, the rebels have not been fully quelled, and it would be unwise for us to let down our guard. However, that is not to say that I believe it impossible for us to think towards the future._

_These past few years, since Queen Patricia joined the Goddess, there have been few places for a woman in the royal court. My newfound position as ruler of the Faerghus Dukedom allows for me to take women into my household as maids of honor and ladies-in-waiting. Now that this opportunity is mine, I would seize it, if I can._

_I invite your daughter, Lady Ingrid Brandl Galatea, to my court, so that she may serve as my lady-in-waiting. I understand that Lady Ingrid has rarely been at court since Queen Patricia’s death. Doubtless she will appreciate the opportunity for advancement as it comes to her now. There are many opportunities to be found at court, and many rewards to those who are obedient and keep faith._

_I await your answer, though I pray that you do not take long to decide. Rebel activity in the east has been on the rise, and the roads have proven hazardous in the past. I can only predict they will grow more so, in the future._

_May this letter find you well,_

And then, there was a huge, scrawled signature that took up nearly a quarter of the page.

The parchment was supple and firm, of about the highest quality you would find anywhere in the Kingdom. It crumpled in Ingrid’s hands just as the cheapest, most brittle parchment would have done, and after a few moments, she could feel her fingernails breaking through.

When she finally spoke, her voice didn’t sound like her own. It was far too even, far too calm, almost _flippant_. All her emotions felt far away; it was hard to be anything but flippant, but it still didn’t feel like her. “I think I would have preferred this be a letter from a suitor.”

Mother snorted. “If you actually go to Fhirdiad, I’ve suspicions Cornelia will be _more _than happy to find a husband for you.” Her grip on Ingrid’s shoulders tightened, fingers worrying at the fabric of Ingrid’s sleeve.

“And you’re _not_,” Father said on a lengthy exhale. “Obviously, you’re not.”

The words came as no surprise to Ingrid. Nevertheless, they succeeded in easing some of the tension in her spine. “What am I to _do_, then? I can’t just—“ Ingrid let the parchment fall to the table; she would have been happier hurling it into the fire, but that would have required shrugging off her mother’s arm, and she had _never _wanted the warmth of her mother’s near-embrace before as she did now “—run away and join the Knights of Seiros. We don’t know where they are, right now, and if it got out I’d joined them, you’d…”

More words that ought not be said. How many of those had Ingrid encountered in her life? Ought not be said, but they had a presence like bitter smoke, choking the air around the three of them.

Ingrid watched as her parents exchanged a long, troubled look.

“Your family?” Father asked Mother, stroking his short, gray beard all the while.

Mother shook her head choppily. “They’re all the way on the other side of the kingdom. She’d have to pass through occupied territory to reach them; there’s just too much risk of someone spotting her on the road. And House Schirmer is in much the same position as ours. They can’t risk drawing the ire of Imperial forces. They—“ Her eyes darted to Ingrid’s face. Her next words, voice cracking slightly, were addressed to Ingrid. “My dear, I am afraid they might turn you over to Cornelia, if you went to them.”

Ingrid thought of the cousins she had slept in makeshift tents with, in this very room. She thought of her uncle and aunt, always seeking for advancement in any way they could find it, for Ingrid’s father’s family was not the only noble house in Faerghus that had little that they did not fight to attain, fight to hold onto.

Ingrid picked at her sleeve cuff, her hands itching for her lance, her sword, the reins of her pegasus.

“Oh, what _are _we to do?” Mother fretted, sucking a sharp breath in through a gate of gritted teeth. “She can’t _stay _here. I’m not convinced that some of our servants haven’t been suborned; if we tried to hide her here, like as not someone would carry tales all the way back to Fhirdiad.”

“I…” Ingrid watched her father slump back in his chair. He looked old. That was, absurdly, the most jarring thing about all of this. Ingrid knew he had not been an exceptionally young man when she was born, but never before had he seemed old to her eyes. “I’ll think of something.”

-0-0-0-

“Father says your funeral was nice.”

The words did not register at first. The burn of long exercise, the effort needed to keep from being knocked straight to the ground by her opponent, these things tended to put such things as registering speech out of Ingrid’s mind. But though the words didn’t quite reach the part of her mind that might have provided understanding, she still knew that words had been _said_. So she paused, let the tip of her training lance tap the ground with a dull thud, and blinked at her opponent. “Pardon?”

Felix eyed her like he wasn’t sure whether to jibe or call for a healer. “Did you hit your head last time?” Ah, jibing had won out.

“_No_. Just repeat what you just told me.”

Felix shrugged, raking his fingernails up and down the well-worn handle of his wooden training sword. “Father sent a letter ahead of him. He said your funeral was nice.” And then, he eyed her again, a tight-lipped expression like the beginnings of nausea coming over his face.

Well, it seemed like _he _hadn’t forgotten their last argument before the violent close of the school year, either.

Ingrid bit back a sigh, and raised up her training lance, a silent signal to continue the sparring match. Not a gesture that Felix, of all people, was likely to ignore, and sure enough, he nodded, and lifted up his sword.

_Maybe I shouldn’t have—_

Whatever.

“Did Lord Rodrigue say—“ Maintaining a conversation during sparring wasn’t Ingrid’s strong suit, but she might as well try to improve that skill; the added ability to concentrate on more than one thing at one time would, she hoped, serve her well “—if there was anyone from Fhirdiad there? Or from the Empire?”

What she hoped, what she really hoped, was that Cornelia just sort of brushed off news of her “death.” The woman was, after all, trying to usurp control of an entire kingdom; surely she had greater concerns than one woman, and the mystery illness she had come down with some months back. _I don’t want to be the device by which our house’s subjugation is ensured. I don’t want to be the tool she uses to destroy us…_

And again, Felix was looking at her like he thought she might have hit her head, though this time he had the forbearance to keep from saying so aloud. “No, obviously. Father’s judgment isn’t—“ he grimaced “—always sound, but he has sense enough not to stick around where the Empire’s lurking.”

“Did they increase the reward again?”

Felix’s face screwed up. “Last week, yes.” He let out an exasperated breath, though Ingrid didn’t think it was her he was so exasperated with. “Father’s head has to be the most valuable thing north of Enbarr by now.”

Ingrid could almost laugh. “He probably thinks it’s funny.”

In between a strike with the sword that failed to go at Ingrid’s knees like he’d intended (he hit below the belt so often that Ingrid had come to expect it by now; not at all knightly of him, but then, this _was _Felix—he probably knew that, and the knowledge was likely what kept him doing it), Felix rolled his eyes. “Well, Father’s sense of humor was always a disaster. He still shouldn’t be taking stupid risks, though,” he muttered, jaw set.

“It makes the lie more convincing if he goes to ‘my’ funeral.”

“Still a stupid risk,” Felix muttered again, but without any real heat to his voice.

They’d met to spar nearly every day since Ingrid had first come here—at least, every day Felix wasn’t out on the front lines, and _those _days were amounting to rather more than made Ingrid comfortable. She couldn’t join Felix out on the front lines, or his father, or his uncle. Under most circumstances, she couldn’t even leave the _house_—everyone, up to and including Lord Rodrigue himself, was confident that Cornelia’s spies had yet to penetrate this deep into Fraldarius territory, but all it took was one substantiated sighting to expose her father’s deception. Caution must be exercised.

_I will not be the device by which my family is destroyed._

The outside world was, at present, lost to her. Hence, Ingrid had been spending a lot of time at the training grounds in what was, for the foreseeable future, her home, and been thanking the Goddess all the while that the training grounds here were fully enclosed, with no windows. If even this had been lost to her, Ingrid suspected she would have made a considerably less amiable houseguest.

And if Felix was going to pop in on her pretty much every day he was here and insist on a sparring match, Ingrid wasn’t going to complain. Even determined to train every day, she would have grown rusty if she’d never had anyone else to spar with (asking Felix’s father, or even his uncle, didn’t feel right, though Ingrid couldn’t quite say why; breach of hospitality etiquette, perhaps?), and there _would _come a day when Ingrid entered the battlefield again. She needed all the practice she could get.

Felix had yet to say just why it was that he came to her with this same request, day after day. Ingrid hadn’t known him this long _not _to know how Felix was about his training—Sylvain was the one Ingrid had to remind about it, not Felix. (And given the way things were going in Gautier territory, Ingrid thought she might not have to remind him quite as much as she used to.) It was possible that there was something that made her a more attractive sparring partner than the household knights, though Ingrid had never known Felix’s hatred of knights to ever take him as far as refusing to spar with them.

Then again, there was the alternative…

Whatever. Ingrid wasn’t as averse to pity as certain others thought her. Not when that pity was expressed in a manner that was actually practical.

“My old man also said your father had a sarcophagus made for you in your family’s crypt.” Felix raised an eyebrow as he neatly ducked away from the swing of Ingrid’s lance. “Funny, your father always seemed too cheap to want to go to all that trouble if you’re not actually around to _put _in the crypt.”

Ingrid glowered in response. The next strike of her lance fell a bit heavier against his sword than what was, strictly speaking, necessary, but she could take little satisfaction when Felix staggered under the weight of her blow. “Hey, just because you and your father don’t get on, doesn’t mean you get to pick at mine.”

She drew back, letting her lance tip butt against the ground again, and dig a thin furrow in the earth as she took yet a few more steps back. Suddenly, the burn of exercise translated itself into exhaustion. Her shoulders quivered bonelessly. “It has to be convincing.” The words dragged on her tongue, heavy as lead. “Father was very clear: we must give Cornelia no cause to believe things are other than what he told her. I’ve no desire to live under her thumb, and I’ve even less desire to watch my family die because our performance wasn’t convincing enough to fool her.”

Her lance slipped out of her hand with a clatter muted by the earth—not hard enough to provide even a hard noise that might have strengthened her. Typical.

She didn’t bother waiting for a reply, instead stalking over to the nearest wall and sitting down heavily with her back to it. One hand pawed at the dry dust beneath her, the other reached up to mop away the sweat she hadn’t felt forming on her brow until just now, and all the while, she could feel Felix’s gaze trying to burn a hole into the top of her head, but she didn’t look up.

Instead, Ingrid watched his legs as he went over to the racks to put his sword away. After a moment’s pause, he did the same with her lance. Ingrid would have expected Felix to leave the training grounds, maybe without so much as a farewell, but today, he chose to surprise her, and sat down about a foot off to her right.

Maybe he was just tired. He certainly wasn’t saying anything.

Silence punctuated only by labored breathing made for a poor silence to gather thoughts in.

_Just break it, then._

“I don’t want to be anyone’s pawn.” Her lips would form no other words but these. “I don’t.”

“……I know.”

But the silence that came down after that was more fraught than the last.

What to do, after this? She was housebound; she couldn’t go out to the stables to care her pegasus, not right now. (Felix swore repeatedly that the grooms were giving Kyphon the best of care, but Ingrid itched to see for herself. Oh, well. Soon, winter would come, and it would bring with it nights dark enough for her to at least take him around the paddock.) None of the men in this house were big readers—anymore—and the library was honestly less plentiful than Ingrid remembered it being during her last visit.

The chapel was directly connected to the main house. She might go there, and pray.

“Ingrid.” Felix’s voice cut through the fraught silence like a knife. When she looked over to him, he did not look at her in turn. Instead, he stared straight ahead, head held level. “I…” He frowned. “I apologize.”

Ingrid scrubbed her forehead. “What exactly are you apologizing for?” she asked tiredly. “The mess you made of my last saddle? That necklace you and his Highness broke when we were ten?”

“You know _what_.” That tone was not quite what Ingrid thought traditional when apologies were being issued, and Felix seemed to realize it, too, for he hunched his shoulders up like a vulture’s. Very deliberately, he said, “When I told you you needed to get a husband. We were arguing. I spoke out of turn. I apologize.”

What brought this on, months after the fact, Ingrid had no idea. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know; she could think of a few reasons, each of them less attractive than the one that came before it. (This sort of pity wasn’t practical, not at all.)

In place of everything else she could have said, Ingrid retorted, unable to find any heat to fire her voice, “Do you really think you’re the first person who’s ever told me something like that?”

“Well, no,” he answered her frankly.

“Huh, well thank you for not playing dumb. I think you may be the first person who’s ever apologized to me for it, though, so there’s that.”

It wasn’t much. It was something, though.

They settled back into a silence somewhat more comfortable, Ingrid taking the chance to actually catch her breath and let her limbs stop tingling before she got up again. She thought she’d go to the chapel. Maybe not to pray, but the atmosphere there was nice. (She found herself missing keenly the cathedral at Garreg Mach.) House Fraldarius actually had the money to put in stained glass windows in the chapel, and Ingrid liked to go there just to look at them, let alone to pray.

“Ingrid.” Felix’s voice was harder now, the hardness of stone rather than steel, something that sought to block rather than cut. “We can’t help anyone if we’re dead. We can’t be any use to anyone if we’re dead.”

He hadn’t forgotten _any _of their last argument before the end of the school year, it seemed. Somehow, Ingrid hadn’t expected him to.

She looked over his way. And Ingrid thought, for the first time, about how Felix never wore armor when he went out to fight. It drove his father to distraction, the way he’d refuse to wear more than the most basic in leathers and maybe a gambeson if he was feeling cautious. Whether Felix relied on his luck or his speed to spare him, he’d never said.

“I know that.”

She longed for a day when she could be useful again.

-0-0-0-

The years passed slowly, and Ailell began to dim in her memory, as a guttering candle lit up less and less of a room the closer it came to burning to nothing. But all the while, Ailell was shooting fiery veins into the rest of Fódlan, burning everything it touched, and perhaps the memory of Ailell had only begun to dim in Ingrid’s mind because the rest of the world had come to reflect it more vividly than the colors of the real thing.


	3. Chapter Three

When she was a young girl, still naïve in the ways of the things that went on between husbands and wives, Ingrid had asked her father how he felt about her mother.

The answer he had given had stuck with her to this very day, for how unusual it had revealed itself to be after Ingrid had grown somewhat wiser in the way of the world, and the way of husbands and wives. “The way I feel about your mother,” he had said, after a long, thoughtful pause, “is, I think, not dissimilar to the way a knight feels about their liege lord. When I look at her, I see someone I wish to protect.” He smiled at her then, reaching out to lay his hand palm-down on the top of Ingrid’s head. “I would lay down my life to protect her, you know. I pray that one day, we will find for you a man who feels the same when he looks at you.”

Those words had come back to her in this moment, and Ingrid could only wish she was ignorant of the reason as to why.

“Ingrid?”

Others might have considered it a bad idea, and Ingrid had no doubt her parents would be telling her as much the next time she saw them—and then some—but in the end, everyone in their class had kept the promise to return to the monastery on the night of what would have been the Millennium Festival, had things continued on as they were. (All but one. Ingrid would pray, and pray again, and now that confirmation was hers, she did not care for clemency for her own soul. There were bigger thing to worry about than that.) They were the blood of Faerghus, all of them—even Mercedes’s having been born in the Empire paled in the face of the life she had spent there, the way the blood of Faerghus had flowed into her open veins. They were the blood of Faerghus, and each and every one of them would keep faith, to whatever end that brought them.

Returning to the monastery had presented Ingrid with both rewards and punishments. Professor Melusine turned out, somehow, to still be alive after her long fall, though neither Ingrid not Professor Melusine herself could quite figure out how that was. Dimitri was also alive, though his mind was not— Ingrid had grown up on tales of stalwart knights who remained true to their ideals in the face of travails that would have broken anyone else, but though others might have believed otherwise of her, Ingrid knew enough about the way the world really worked to know that there were things that could break even the truest spirit. He had been on his own for five years.

Well, not entirely on his own. He had been in the sole company of his demons for five years. Ingrid would not feign knowledge of what that could do to a person. She was learning more about what that could do to a person every day.

She would not dwell on their personal travails, not now. The monastery was in crumbling shambles, but finally, they were taking steps to fight proactively against the Empire, instead of simply reacting to every new ill that befell them. Action was a balm for many ills.

Soon, it would come out that the Knights of Seiros had returned to the monastery. The news could not be suppressed forever, especially not when they began to march on the Empire. When the news got out, Ingrid wondered how many of their classmates from the other houses would return to the monastery to join the fight. It would be… instructive, to learn how many of them had managed to keep faith in the past five years.

One of them had returned to the monastery much sooner than expected. (Or at all.)

There was no mistaking that voice; five years it had been since Ingrid had last heard it, but it had made its indelible mark upon her memory long ago, and time and distance had not been long enough to remove the impression it made upon her heart.

There was also no mistaking the way that voice broke upon the sounding of her name.

Ingrid had been walking up the main steps back into the monastery from the skeleton of the deserted marketplace, and upon hearing that voice, she froze. The wind beat mercilessly at her back, giggling as it made its latest attempt to make her slip on the icy steps, but that laughter changed tack as Ingrid felt all the blood drain from her face, mischief turned to petty malice. She had not expected this at all.

In the silvery light cast down on them by a weak winter sun mostly cloaked by cloud, Dorothea looked completely unreal. Ingrid almost _could _believe her unreal, the phantom of a mind that longed to carve out some sort of normalcy from this ruined place, and could do so only by looking to the past. But that could not be the case. She who stood before Ingrid now at the bottom of the steps had a solidity to her that no phantasm could ever conjure for themselves.

No phantasm could ever hope to have changed as a living person changes with the death of so many years, either.

This was all, Ingrid thought, as she stood there, frozen, transfixed, struck utterly dumb, _screamingly _unfair. Dorothea had been a pretty girl when they attended school here together; she was beautiful, now. What little baby fat had softened the angles of her face had left it behind, leaving precise, elegant lines—high, fine cheekbones, a straight nose, a narrow, angular jaw. Her hair gleamed more lustrously than Ingrid remembered, shining even in this weak light. She wore a purple shawl wrapped securely around her shoulders, but Ingrid could still get a good look at the dress she wore underneath, and, well… Well. Ingrid had never paid close attention to fashions. She was no great poet when it came to describing women’s clothes. What she would say was that Dorothea’s dress made her look like the illustrations of the Maiden of the Wind, which was just… Ugh, that shouldn’t be _allowed._

_You’d think five years would have been enough to put an end to this._

No, what Ingrid had thought dead had been merely sleeping.

_She’s here. _Ingrid couldn’t remember ever getting this giddy over Glenn. _She’s here, she’s alive, she’s _safe_, I—_

Ingrid wanted to say something. Her only fallbacks for situations like these were the tales she’d grown up with. _The Moon Knight’s Tale _had had its hero reunite with a maiden after a long period apart, but that scene hadn’t had any dialogue, damn it. Okay, _fine_. It looked like she’d just have to wing it.

…

Dorothea was still staring at her, looking, Ingrid noticed for the first time, completely stricken.

“………Hi?”

Suddenly, for the first (and hopefully last) time in her life, Ingrid wished she had paid a bit more attention to the lines Sylvain used on the legion of girls he’d been going through since he was about twelve, if only so she’d have something more elaborate to say than just _hi_, Goddess damn it. As it stood, she could only be grateful that Sylvain wasn’t here to laugh at her for having nothing more elaborate to say than just _hi_.

Dorothea, of all people, probably knew of more elaborate things to say than just _hi_. But Dorothea wasn’t commenting on Ingrid’s utter failure to actually say a greeting worthy of their reuniting after five years apart. Instead, she was making her way up the steps, slowly, and Ingrid would have though it to be for fear of the ice, if Dorothea hadn’t been looking at her like she was afraid Ingrid would vanish in a puff of smoke if she moved too quickly.

“Ingrid,” Dorothea said again, once they were stood on the same step. Her voice was faint, her face pale where the wind should have been chafing her cheeks a rosy red. For all that Ingrid had thought her utterly unreal-looking when first she laid eyes on her, the way Dorothea was looking at her now, Ingrid could almost have thought _herself _some sort of phantasm.

It occurred suddenly to Ingrid that she didn’t know just how much news of what was going on in the Kingdom had trickled down to Enbarr.

Oh.

_Oh_.

Maybe she should try that greeting again.

“It’s…” Ingrid tried for a smile, knew without needing a mirror that she hadn’t achieved anything approaching reassuring. “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”

And in her attempts not to sound like a lecher, she’d managed instead to come off as completely detached. The wind persisted in giggling obnoxiously in Ingrid’s ears; at least the Goddess was too preoccupied with making a new Ailell of all of Fódlan to join in.

“I—“

Anything else Ingrid might have said fled her mind as all the air was abruptly knocked out of her lungs.

“I can’t believe you’re _here_.” Dorothea voice, slightly croaking, sounded very close to Ingrid’s ear; puffs of hot breath tickled her skin. As Ingrid tried desperately to steady herself—both of them, really—on the icy steps, a wave of bright, floral perfume hit her like a sledgehammer, making her head swim in a way that ought to have been unpleasant, but succeeded only in making her even more giddy than she was to start with. “I’ve been hearing all of these rumors, I, I, people were saying you’d been taken prisoner, people were saying you’d _died_…” Her voice broke again, and Ingrid was suddenly glad that she couldn’t see the expression that would have matched it for all the hair that filled her field of vision.

“I’m… alright, Dorothea, I—whoa-oh!”

“Ack!”

They wobbled dangerously on the steps. The ice had been gleefully tripping people up these past few days, and now it claimed another two victims. Ingrid clutched Dorothea’s back reflexively as her feet shot out from under her. The skies wheeled in her vision, a swirling tempest of silver-gray, and then the ground rushed up to meet them as they landed heavily on their sides, knocking the air out of Ingrid’s lungs for the second time that day.

For a long moment, there was silence, as the two of them caught their breath. Ingrid’s side, as well as the leg she’d fallen on most heavily, throbbed with a dull ache that she knew all too well would translate later to bruises and the kind of sore muscles that made it painful to lift a lance, let alone train with it. But she’d managed to keep from hitting her head, at least. And her heavy winter clothes had cushioned her somewhat.

She was looking into Dorothea’s face, now; they were so close together that their noses almost touched. Dorothea’s long hair was in disarray, spilling over the slick steps in a cascade. Her eyes were very, very bright, and what issued from her lips might have been a laugh, though it had the shaky babble of water heading for a waterfall. Ingrid backed up a little, praying she wasn’t blushing hard enough for Dorothea to notice.

There came another sound of laughter, though this time it was a throaty chuckle, not something bound for that long drop after all. “Oh, Ingrid.” Her eyes were still so very bright (Ingrid found herself looking for stars). She brushed her shockingly cold fingertips against Ingrid’s cheek. “You’re so cute when you’re flustered. I’d almost forgotten.”

This time, Ingrid didn’t dare open her mouth to speak. She wasn’t certain whatever came out would be _intelligible, _let alone appropriate.

This _isn’t appropriate_. Ingrid inched a little further away. _But I—_

“Ahh!”

Her mind chose that moment, that _very_ moment, to remind her that Dorothea had landed just as heavily as her, in considerably thinner clothes.

Ingrid sat bolt upright, shaking off Dorothea’s arm without even noticing. “Are you alright? You didn’t hit your head, did you?”

“Oh, I’m fine, Ingrid, don’t worry.” Dorothea sat up, taking a moment to smooth down her disheveled hair before wrapping her shawl back in the position it had been in before she fell. Something glinted on her left hand, but Ingrid was a bit too distracted by her face to pay it much mind (Yet). She quirked an eyebrow, lips twitching in a teasing smirk. “A certain someone broke my fall a bit.”

She reached out for Ingrid’s face again, her palm resting lightly against Ingrid’s left cheek, and the too-bright glimmer in Dorothea’s green, green eyes kept Ingrid from looking away. “But enough about that—what _happened _to you? The last I heard, you were supposed to have been taken prisoner in Arianrhod, or that you died of some sort of plague. But you’re _here_.”

Ingrid could almost laugh, even if the sound would have been bitter enough to curdle the frigid air around her. “Well, the first is just wild rumor, but the second is actually the story we came up with.”

“Story?” Dorothea took her hand away from Ingrid’s cheek, leaving the skin there miserably cold compared to the rest of Ingrid’s face. She tilted her head quizzically. “What do you mean?”

Dorothea was owed an explanation, as much as retelling the story in full felt like replacing the tissues beneath Ingrid’s skin with a hairshirt made of wire. Ingrid sighed, adjusting the collar of her coat before she launched into her explanation. “A couple of months after I returned home—so, after Cornelia usurped power in Fhirdiad—“

“And believe me, there are plenty of people all over the Empire who’d _love _to know how she pulled that off so quickly without someone killing her in her sleep first,” Dorothea muttered, punctuated with a huff that emerged as a puff of silvery fog around her mouth.

“If I could finish,” but there was little heat in Ingrid’s voice to fuel the rebuke. “Anyways, a couple of months after I returned home, my parents received a letter from Fhirdiad.” Ingrid stared down at her hands, unable for a moment even to speak. Why was this so hard? “From Cornelia herself.”

The words didn’t want to creep out of her mouth. Nearly five years past, and talking about it resurrected all too easily the specter of being made a pawn, a device, mind and soul disregarded as she was reduced to flesh and the pull it had over others. She had never wanted to be made a princess in a tower, waiting for someone else to rescue her, but the world kept trying to make her such regardless of her wishes.

“I received an… _invitation _to join her court in Fhirdiad.” And though Ingrid knew Dorothea came from a very different background than her own, it seemed that some knowledge was the lot of women the world over, for Dorothea nodded grimly, her bright eyes taking on a steely sheen. “After that, my father had to think of _something _to throw her off my trail, and well, so long as I didn’t get caught, faking my death seemed like a good idea.” Ingrid made a noise in the back of her throat that might, in other situations, have been a laugh. “I’m told Father had my sarcophagus lined with a metal that dampens the effects of magical attacks. It would take a while for even her best mages to get into it to find the straw my father had put there in place of a human corpse. After that—“ it was easier to think about the long periods of confinement, of being housebound and _useless_, if only because these things inspired only irritation after the fact, rather than anything that could carry over to her dreams “—I went to live with Felix and his father, and there I stayed for several years.” She shrugged. “And now, I’m here.”

Dorothea pressed her hands to Ingrid’s shoulders, shaking her head and laughing weakly. “Oh, Ingrid, you really are a character from an opera. If I told the others back in Enbarr about all of this, they’d think I was making it up.”

With a thin, slightly lopsided smile, “I always aim to be impressive.”

If this was to be their dynamic now, Ingrid thought… Ingrid thought that she didn’t quite mind it. Mayhap she was only turning her face away from the reality of her own life, and she doubted Dorothea had experienced any great change in her ideals regarding fealty and proper loyalty in the past few years, but this was… It was nice. (It was so nice to be about among people, again.)

Again, a glint of light flashed on Dorothea’s left hand, and this time, Ingrid let her gaze wander over to it. The smile died off of Ingrid’s face. All noise died out of her ears.

“Dorothea, is that—“

Even before she got her answer, she knew that it was. The delicate, interwoven design was highly distinctive, and even before it had been hers, Ingrid had seen it on her grandmother’s hand nearly every day. The passage of several years had not been enough to strike it from her memory.

Dorothea drew back her hands, holding out her left in particular, rolling the ring with her right thumb and forefinger. “Oh, you remembered.”

_How was I ever supposed to _forget_?_

“A few days before the Empire attacked the monastery, I went to Professor Melusine to ask for the ring,” Dorothea explained casually, as if the ring wasn’t a ring at all, was just some cheap bauble Ingrid had picked up from a stall in the marketplace. “I know you meant it as a gift, and I didn’t want to risk not having it with me when I went back home. And I thought it would distract you to know I’d gotten it back from her, so I didn’t want to say anything. I…” Her shoulders shook as a bubble of laughter quivered in her mouth. “…I didn’t realize it was a goddess ring until I actually put it on. You’re so sweet—“ her eyes crinkled up as she smiled “—to give me a good-luck charm like this.”

-0-0-0-

“You know, I can’t be sure, but I seem to remember us having a _very _similar conversation back when we were in school.” Fires of Ailell, he was even sitting in the same leaning-on-his-hands posture he’d adopted back then. “Funny how that works.”

Ingrid couldn’t snap at him to be serious. She couldn’t even glare. All she could do was sit in her chair, nurse her head in her hands with her fingertips wound in her hair, and wonder if that was_ really _the Goddess who’d been laughing at her all those years ago, after all. The way things had been going, a demon of mischance might have been more appropriate.

Sylvain took her silence as license to press on. “So…” Ingrid looked up just enough to see him struggling for words, scrubbing at his hands as if cleanliness was to be found only at some point beneath his skin. “So, uhh, she took the ring, after all?”

The wobbly note jarring his voice at least made Ingrid think she might not get laughed at this time. (Had he laughed, that time? All of her recollections said ‘yes,’ but she heard laughter that wasn’t really there a _lot_.) “Yes, she did.” And as soon as Ingrid had unwound her fingers from her hair, she was slapping one of her hands onto her forehead. The sting didn’t solve her problems, but it at least felt good. “But she just called it a good-luck charm!”

“Maybe if you’d given her a normal ring—“

“Ahh, I don’t _get _her!” Ingrid groaned. She sprang up from her chair and went over to the window, resting her weight heavily on the windowsill. When they had attended the Officers Academy, the view from Ingrid’s window had been of one of the monastery’s many flower and herb gardens. Now, that space was given over to desolation. Through a thick blanketing of snow, it was impossible not to see the skeletal, grasping outlines of thistles and young trees stripped bare by winter’s fury. Some five years ago, their world had been thrown into chaos. The effects would be making themselves felt for long to come.

If it turned out that one of those effects was Ingrid’s present confusion, she thought she might have to disappoint Dimitri by just killing Edelgard herself.

When Ingrid at last tore her gaze away from the window, Sylvain’s face held none of the near-panic that had gripped it past a certain point in that similar conversation they had had years back. “So… did she try to flirt with you again?” Not that the undercurrent of eagerness trying to hide its face beneath normal curiosity was any more welcome.

“She flirts with _everyone_, Sylvain.”

“_Most _everyone, Ingrid. She mostly stopped with you—after what happened with the ring the first time, I think.”

Which… wasn’t a bad point, when he put it like that. “…A little, I suppose? Not nearly as much as when you two have your verbal fencing matches—“

The reminiscent smile that stole over Sylvain’s face made this whole situation so much more messed up than it needed to be. “Not often I find a girl with enough of a spine to fire back at me.”

Ingrid was just going to ignore that. She neither knew just what to do with that, or particularly wanted to do anything with it at all. Better just to pretend it hadn’t been put to the air at all. “—But yes, I suppose she did. A bit. Maybe. It’s hard to tell.”

Sylvain nodded firmly. “Okay, so she _was _flirting with you. And she’s got the ring, _and _she’s wearing it. As far as declarations go, that sounds pretty clear-cut to me, Ingrid.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“_What’s _not simple? All you’ve gotta do is…”

Sylvain lifted one of his hands, curling his thumb, ring finger and little finger against his palm, leaving only the index and middle finger up. Really, Ingrid should have expected the scissoring motions that followed. Really, she should have. They’d known each other how long, now? This _really _shouldn’t have come as any sort of surprise.

“Sylvain!”

And yet, it was still unexpected enough to hit her like a crashing pegasus.

“What?” On top of that… _gesture_, he had the gall to look at her like _she _was being unreasonable. “You’re both grown women, and before _you _bring up what I know you’re going to bring up, neither of you have arrangements with anyone else that I know about. So why shouldn’t you?”

The images that flashed suddenly through Ingrid’s mind were… She made her mind take a sharp left turn away before the images could get any more lurid than they already were. She had known Sylvain for a long time. Too long, she thought sometimes, and this was one of those times. Some of his lechery must have been rubbing off on her for her to be having the thoughts she was having right now, the little imagined sounds and sensations that were seeping in behind the door she’d just firmly shut in her mind.

Her face felt hot. No, her face didn’t just feel hot; her face felt like she was back in Ailell and she’d stuck her head directly in one of the steam vents. “We have made no promises to one another, either verbal or written. I haven’t even told her how I feel about her, and you jump right to sex? _Really_?”

Ingrid had known Sylvain for a long time. She couldn’t remember a time of her life when she didn’t know him. For all that her house was not a wealthy one, not one with a loud voice in the king’s councils, House Galatea was still one of the houses that held the border. The border houses worked to maintain alliances with one another, for while the houses in the interior of Faerghus did not always understand the struggles of a house that held the border, the other border houses _would_, and thus they almost always responded to requests for aid, unless their own situation was so dire that they absolutely could not afford to carve up their own strength.

Thus, the children of border lords grew up in each other’s company, so that those alliances would be maintained by the next generation. Not long after Glenn died, Ingrid’s father had even considered Sylvain as a potential match for her… until he’d thought about it for about five minutes, and decided that Sylvain’s personal behavior was utterly disqualifying for a potential husband (Though Ingrid suspected that the fact that her father couldn’t raise a dowry large enough to satisfy Margrave Gautier’s expectations had played a part in the match falling through. Just as well; it would have been like marrying one of her brothers).

Sylvain had been a constant fixture in Ingrid’s life, for as long as she could remember. The road between the heart of Galatea territory and the heart of Gautier territory had been a long one, but it was one they had traversed many times in any given year to reach each other. She knew him. Sometimes she thought there were things she might not know, things that were just inexplicable even at the best of times, but she thought she knew him as well as anyone.

The twist-jawed look of utter puzzlement that presented itself upon Sylvain’s face, in conjunction with the question he asked next, “Isn’t that what relationships are _about_?” was one of those things Ingrid had always found inexplicable.

Sometimes, it baffled her. Sometimes, it infuriated her. Today, it struck her just how _long _he’d been holding to that belief, just how long he’d been flitting from one girl to the next, how he hardly ever seemed to know what to do with a girl who just wanted to be friends. What struck her like a millstone lobbed at her chest was that he’d never furnished her with an explanation as to _why _he acted this way—not one that made the slightest bit of sense, anyhow.

_You are going to wind up completely alone one day_, she thought.

“Not to me,” she said.

The thing about inner thoughts was that they tended to be completely visible to anyone who wasn’t experiencing them firsthand. There were times when Ingrid wished Sylvain could read her thoughts, if only so she chastise him properly in a crowded room where she could see him being reckless but couldn’t actually get to him. Today, though, she was glad he couldn’t see or hear what went through her mind—some things, however true, ought not to be said. As it was, Sylvain merely shrugged. “Whatever makes you happy, Ingrid,” he told her, more mildly than she might have expected. “But either way, you’ve got to _say _something to her about all of this. You gotta make your move. You’re not going to be happy until you do.”

Ingrid thought back darkly upon how difficult it had been to string any kind of sentence together before they’d both toppled over. “Easier said than done.”

“Hey, if you don’t know how to talk to girls, I’d be happy to give you some pointers.”

“I know very well how to talk to girls, Sylvain,” she retorted dryly. “Usually the topic of conversation revolves around convincing them not to dismember, disembowel, or geld you. I’m not sure you’re the best person for me to be seeking advice from.”

He snorted. “If you want a lasting relationship… ehh, fair. But I will _definitely _be around to help if you need it. _Definitely_.”

Somehow, that didn’t exactly fill Ingrid with reassurance.

-0-0-0-

Not that pinning Dorothea down long enough (and ugh, even that turn of phrase was planting some images in Ingrid’s mind that she just did _not _need to be dealing with right now) to talk to her over the next few weeks was anything resembling an easy task. The monastery was in ruins, but if this was truly to be the launching point for an invasion of the Empire, it had to be restored at least enough to be inhabitable, even if it wasn’t particularly pretty. As long as their present situation regarding personnel persisted—not nearly enough artisans or construction workers, and it seemed unlikely they’d be getting the amount they needed until _after _the snows melted—the current residents of the monastery all had a _lot _of work to do in any one given day.

Ingrid had stable duties to consider. Feed the horses and the pegasi, muck out their stalls, check the stables over to make sure there weren’t any new infestations of _whatever _that pale, slimy growth they’d found on the far back wall of the stables when they’d first gotten into it was. After that, it was time to go over to where the wyverns roosted and help Cyril scrub that same growth off of the back walls of their caves, so they could finally move the wyverns back _into _their caves. Three days they’d been doing that now, and still, no progress. It clung much more stubbornly to stone than to wood, and Ingrid was seriously considering asking Mercedes over so they could determine exactly what happened to this growth when it was set on fire.

On top of her duties pertaining to making the monastery an actually livable space again, there was guard duty and patrolling to consider. The monastery was a compound of truly titanic proportions, and Ingrid’s shifts on guard duty took her to the far corners of the grounds, where she was unlikely to just stumble across _anyone_, let alone someone who hated the cold the way Dorothea did. (_She’d hate Galatea territory in winter_, Ingrid caught herself thinking, before she forced herself to stop.)

Everyone found themselves being worked hard (With the exception of Lysithea, who was too frail to be given anything truly strenuous to do, and Dimitri, who, well, no one particularly wanted to approach just to tell him there were chores that needed doing). On top of that, everyone found themselves working long, occasionally bizarre hours; Ingrid had had a day where she woke at six, worked until ten, slept until two, and then worked again until one in the following morning. The end result was that everyone was taking their meals (their paltry, paltry meals) whenever they could find the time, and so approaching Dorothea in the dining hall was not really an option, either.

After the attack by Imperial forces, watch duty had only grown more intense. Gilbert and Seteth were both of the opinion that they would have had more forewarning of the attack if their guards had been better-stationed, and Ingrid could hardly disagree with them. Her being able-bodied and generally relied upon to be diligent in her duties, she was often called upon for guard duty.

But there came a day when a winter storm raged too strongly, walls of howling white crashing down on the monastery with the force of an avalanche, and even with an eye towards safety, the guards simply had to come inside. Corpses couldn’t watch over anything. Corpses could defend nothing. Corpses were of no use to anyone.

“Ingrid? Ingrid, can you help me with something?”

Ingrid turned her gaze away from one of the windows in the reception hall (not that she was entirely certainly what she was supposed to have been looking at; when she looked out, she was presented with a swirling sheet of white), to see Dorothea standing close by. Oh, Dorothea had griped often about how she hated the cold when they attended school together, and the way she presented herself now only confirmed the complaints she had made back then. She wore a threadbare woolen coat that Ingrid thought might have been black when it was new, but had since turned to a dull gray the color of clouds just before a thunderstorm. The shawl she’d worn the day the two of them had reunited was wrapped around her neck and shoulders more like a scarf, and it seemed Ingrid wouldn’t have to contend with the distraction of the ring today, for Dorothea was wearing leather gauntlets over her hands and forearms. In spite of all of these layers, she was still shivering noticeably.

_If we were home, I’d take you to the hearth in the solar. We’d sit there and warm ourselves._

Ingrid reminded herself of her family’s poverty, the knowledge of their one reliable solution to that poverty burying itself beneath her skin, sharp as any knife as it carved its words onto her bones. _I can promise her nothing. My future is not my own. But I—_

(Sometimes, she imagined futures for herself that she couldn’t have. Not just Dorothea—honestly, during the five years between the close of the school year and reunion, Dorothea had not featured in many of those imaginings at all. She could be a knight in service to a lord, she could be a general, she could be a knight errant or a mercenary or the bodyguard of an envoy to foreign lands. All the things that had been the backbone of the fantasies her brothers and her male friends had engaged in as children, but she had so rarely ever allowed herself for the selfishness of them. Just lurked on the outskirts of them, been absurdly glad on the occasions when no one tried to press-gang her into playing a princess in a tower or a damsel in distress, and attended to her lessons.)

Ingrid knew just by looking at her that Dorothea couldn’t be comfortable, but her discomfort was actually something of a relief. At least when she was visibly uncomfortable, Ingrid could focus on something that wouldn’t make her face burn. “Yes, of course. What is it?”

Dorothea brushed an errant lock of hair back behind her shoulder. “You may find it a bit boring. I had laundry duty, and the person who was supposed to be helping me fold the laundry and put it away bailed on me. I could use some help.”

Ingrid nodded to her. On an exhale, “Of course. Where is it?”

“We took it upstairs; there was only one place we could find the room. Just follow me.”

Pulse picked up as Ingrid followed Dorothea up the narrow stairwell to the second floor, in a way that had nothing to do with the trivial exertion of moving up those steep steps. It was quiet up here, and dark, the shadows softening the outlines of everything they touched—her view of Dorothea was of someone bearing increasing resemblance to a flickering pillar of smoke. The lanterns were burning low; her skirt glinted like sunlight glinted on obsidian.

Wind howled and battered against the exterior walls as they made their way down one of the narrow corridors. When they passed close by one of those exterior walls, a particularly violent gust of wind battered against it the recently-cleaned windowpanes rattling under the force of the impact. It was still day, however much you could claim day during the fury of a winter blizzard. Speckles of colored light cast by the stained glass windows quivered and danced on the floors and the opposite wall like the way Ingrid’s grandmother used to describe the shadows of fairies, back when her grandmother still liked to talk of fairies. The war had put such things out of her mind.

With the next flurry of wind, it was the wall and the floor that trembled, and what shot through Ingrid’s head were visions of a wind powerful enough to send the building toppling down, with her and Dorothea and all those on the ground floor still trapped inside. She’d had visions like this while she and Felix and Sylvain were trying to make their way here. Things she didn’t want to think, and was thinking anyways. Now, they seemed to intrude at every point that didn’t see her paying proper care to the direction of her own mind.

A little shock of surprise jolted Ingrid when she realized that Dorothea’s course was taking them for the Cardinals’ Room. “We’re… folding the laundry here?”

Dorothea nodded nonchalantly. “That’s right. The only other places with the space I was looking for all see too many people walking through. Folding up clothes just to have to wash them all again is a hassle. I don’t think the cardinals will mind much, since they’re not here.” She paused a moment, tilting her head. “Hey, Ingrid?”

“Yes?”

Dorothea’s face was contorted in a quizzical frown that somehow managed to look artistic instead of baffled, like a painting of a face instead of a real face. “Have you ever seen any of the cardinals?”

“I…” Ingrid stopped in her tracks, her gaze drifting up towards the ceiling. “…Actually, I don’t believe I have.”

Still, Dorothea’s frown was like a painting of a frown, something pored over by an artist for hours before they declared the work finished. “Neither have I. That’s strange. We saw Seteth around the monastery all the time when we were attending the Officers Academy, and back when I was at Mittelfrank we saw the top management nearly every day.”

“I suppose we’ll just have to find out what’s happened to them after things have settled down a bit.”

“Hmm.” A delicate quirk of one well-shaped eyebrow later, “We’ll see. Usually in stories with plot points like that, the cardinals would turn out to have never existed at all, or to be someone we already knew, just in disguise.”

Almost without realizing it, Ingrid felt a smile slowly unfurl over her mouth. “Or they turn out to have been the villains of the piece all along.”

Dorothea laughed suddenly, bright and pleasing. “Oh, have you listened to these tales as well?”

“Yes.” Ingrid’s smile slowly faded. “But I think mine might be a bit different than yours.”

As Dorothea pressed open the door, she nodded, hand lingering on the doorframe. “They probably are. But come along. The clothes won’t fold themselves.”

Since it was winter, clothes-washing tended to be a bit more infrequent than it would have been during times of year that actually saw people _sweating _on a regular basis. Particularly considering their limited resources, limited time, and the fact that there were a lot less people around than would normally be found at the monastery if it _wasn’t _a skeleton of a place, meant that there were less clothes for laundry than there might have otherwise been. Still, the sight that greeted Ingrid managed to take her back.

“You and your partner hauled all three of these tubs up the stairs?” Said tubs being big enough around to fit three well-grown children inside, and all of them full of clothes.

“I…” Dorothea’s thin smile was tinged with something Ingrid couldn’t quite recognize, something she wasn’t quite certain she wanted to identify. “...May have persuaded some of the knights to help us with the tubs. After all, these are _their _clothes, too; it’s only fair they lend us a hand.”

Ingrid wouldn’t dwell on what Dorothea meant by ‘persuaded.’ She knew her to be capable of multiple kinds. Best to leave it alone.

They set themselves to folding for the next several minutes, Ingrid unwillingly marveling at the number of stains that could be found on multiple different items of men’s clothing. Where words were absent, the wind, barely muffled by the sturdy walls, kept interjecting where conversation could have been, roaring a tirade Ingrid knew all too well from her own past winters. She had spent many winters as a child trapped inside—

_useless_

—and she had spent that time learning the words the wind screamed at stone walls with the gall to break their stride. Most of it did not bear repeating.

Perhaps the wind spoke with a different voice in Enbarr. Dorothea was ignoring it quite profoundly, never even bothering to look up from the clothes she was folding to glance nervously at the window as Ingrid had seen many others do over the past few days. As Ingrid watched her out of the corner of her eye, said eyes kept straying to the way her hair fell, waving gently, over her jaw, and this only because she’d decided after half a second’s contemplation that it wasn’t safe to look at her lips.

If she strained, she could still smell that perfume—

This was intolerable.

_So say something_.

“So… What did you do after you left the Academy?”

Of all the conversations Ingrid could have, she did not feel like having a conversation about _feelings _right now. There were venues appropriate to such a conversation about that, a time and a place, and a makeshift laundry room in the middle of a blizzard was neither the time nor the place. _A knight would do it in a meadow filled with flowers. _But Ingrid was not a knight. If the time came, she would make do with what she had.

Dorothea shrugged. “I went back to Enbarr. It was the only place I’d ever lived, asides from Garreg Mach—it wasn’t like there were a whole lot of other places I could have gone.” She reached up to tug at the collar of her threadbare coat, so absently that Ingrid wasn’t entirely certain she realized she was doing it. “If I’m being honest, I would have liked to have arranged things by the time we were done with school so I wouldn’t have to go back at all.”

Had she taken the ring as some sort of consolation prize?

“I went back to Mittelfrank,” she went on, oblivious to any of what was going through Ingrid’s mind. “It was that or…” the air curdled around her “…going back to what I did before Mittelfrank. And I sang again. For a while.”

Two questions were born from that. The less pressing could go first.

“I’ve never seen an opera. There are no opera houses in Faerghus, and even if there were—“ Ingrid could still remember the day she realized her parents and siblings and grandmother were all eating watered-down soup, while hers was still thick “—we would not have had the time to attend an opera there. Any opera houses would likely establish themselves in Fhirdiad. It’s too far a distance to travel just for the performance of a few hours.” She stole another glance at Dorothea, trying to imagine how her hair would gleam under a spotlight. “What is it like, working as an opera singer?”

Innocent, the question had seemed. Completely innocuous. But Ingrid watched as Dorothea’s back stiffened and her gloved hands froze over the pile of clothes, and it would seem she had taken a wrong turn.

(_Mother tried to make me pay more attention when my tutor was teaching me how to make conversation properly. She tried to teach me herself once the tutor threw up her hands and gave up. I should have listened more. I should have tried harder. _It had been like wearing a hairshirt made of hooks. _I should have—_)

Dorothea’s laugh was jarringly loud, and beneath the light, musical tone of it, Ingrid could hear an edge sharp enough to cut. And as Ingrid watched Dorothea’s expression completely rearrange itself in the space of maybe a second and a half, she felt as if someone had dropped a sliver of purest, coldest ice into her blood.

“Oh, my sweet Ingrid.” Dorothea pressed the curled back of her gloved hand against her cheek, smiling in a way that only made Ingrid feel a bit more as if her skin was being cut. “You’d find it all terribly boring.”

“I would like to hear about it, though, if you care to tell me,” Ingrid replied softly. If it was something that could make her understand a little better, then she didn’t think it boring at all.

That sparkling, sharp expression, something that reminded Ingrid of nothing so much as a mask made of ice, held for a few seconds more. Then, like all ice must, it melted, leaving them with something more neutral, something softer, and something else Ingrid was working, even now, to identify. Dorothea smiled, a smile that hid all of her teeth behind pressed lips. “Being on the stage is lovely,” she murmured. “I can’t begin to describe to you how thrilling it is to sing on a stage. In the spotlight, in costume, in the eyes of the audience. You can become a completely different person when you go out on that stage, and that…” She laughed softly. “…That has presented a strong allure to many of us. But when you look behind you, to the back of the stage, you’ll see that the spotlights have cast dark shadows behind you. And you can’t stay on stage forever.”

Ingrid stared searchingly into her face. “What kind of shadows?”

With a slow shrug, “Nothing you want to hear about right now, I’m sure. Once this is all over, maybe I’ll tell you then.” Dorothea turned to folding a long tunic, fingers absently smoothing out wrinkles they didn’t currently have a clothes iron to get rid of. “But for now—“ there came another smile, a thing like old paper, fit to disintegrate into nothingness “—I think our lives are giving us enough nightmares to deal with. Don’t you?”

Nightmares. Yes, Ingrid had plenty of those to deal with.

_I ought to say that I can contend with anything she chooses to tell me. I ought to be able to say that I am willing to listen to anything she wishes to tell me. My parents shoulder their burdens together; I ought to be able to—_

Dorothea had made her own wishes on the matter clear. That would have to be enough.

And suddenly, the second question Ingrid had intended to ask was sounding even more fraught than it had before, even to Ingrid’s own ears, even unsaid.

_But she can just refuse to answer it, can she not?_

Ingrid had little doubt that Dorothea would refuse to answer it, if she was so inclined.

“Dorothea, I am curious. Why did you leave the opera company?”

For a long moment, there was… not silence, not exactly. Outside, the wind still battered mercilessly against the exterior walls, giving every impression of trying to bring the whole building down. Faux-fairy shadows danced a drunken line across the tables, making the drab clothes Ingrid was folding look almost vibrant.

“Hmm…” Dorothea pursed her lips. “That’s an interesting question. I suppose I—“

But she never did finish that sentence.

“Oh, so _this _is where you two snuck off to.”

The moment Ingrid heard that voice, heard the tone carried within it, it was as if Ailell had descended upon them even here in this holy place. She almost wished it _had_; compared to what was inevitably going to happen next, being inundated by lava and flames sounded almost pleasant. _Of course he got taken off of guard duty as well. Ugh, why couldn’t he have sheltered in the dining hall, instead?_

Long exposure to Ingrid’s glares had years ago inured Sylvain to their effects; he noticed them about as much as he noticed the stars in the sky on a cloudy night. The way he could press on in the face of glares, heedless of any potential danger to himself, would have been somewhat admirable had it not been for the sheer recklessness that accompanied it, had it not been for the nature of those glares and why they existed. As it was, Ingrid spent half of her time despairing of his safety, and the other half of her time wondering if a sharp lesson wouldn’t be enough to finally knock some sense into his head.

Sense would not be knocking on his skull today. Sylvain strode into the room, blithely unaware of any of what was going through Ingrid’s mind. He waggled his eyebrows in a way that made Ingrid want the earth to swallow either herself or him whole—she wasn’t sure which, as of yet. “Went off for some alone time, did you?” And the lascivious tone saturating his voice with sleaze demeaned everyone involved in this conversation.

“There _are _chores we’re supposed to be doing, Sylvain,” Ingrid reminded him. When she was satisfied that Dorothea wasn’t looking at her face, Ingrid shot Sylvain a look, the meaning of which she prayed he’d be able to understand, even if her glares just kept on sailing right over his head: _go away_. “Don’t you have anything you need to be doing right now?”

“Afraid not,” was the reply Ingrid received, in such a tone as did not express regret at all. All the while, Sylvain was shooting her a look right back, something she was afraid she knew all too well the meaning of: _You managed to get somewhere secluded with Dorothea, and all you’re doing is folding _clothes_? Really? _“All they had me doing before was guard duty—I just can’t be trusted with tasks involving talking to people, apparently—and so long as the blizzard’s still going strong, I have nothing to do.” He laughed ruefully, running his hand through his hair. “I went looking for conversation, but no one I wanted to talk to was willing to talk back. Funny, huh?”

Dorothea abandoned her clothes-folding, a guttural sound like a cross between a laugh and the noise a cat made when it was gagging rising up from the back of her throat. She regarded Sylvain with dancing eyes and a teasing smirk Ingrid had seen on her face many times before, and oh, Ingrid definitely knew which one she wanted the earth to swallow, now—herself, without a doubt. “Aww. Did your charm get a bit flaccid while you were stuck fighting?” Her smirk sharpened to a razor’s edge. “That’s such a shame, Sylvain; I was looking forward to seeing how you’d follow up that last chat we had before leaving school.”

Well, this conversation was taking a turn for the horrifying. Ingrid made a unilateral decision, right then and there, that she wanted no part of it.

“Hey, there’s nothing flaccid about my charm.” And it was only the knowledge that, no matter how defensive he might get, Sylvain wasn’t at all given to public demonstrations of how not-flaccid his ‘charm’ was, that kept Ingrid from immediately bolting. “I’m just a bit rusty. You don’t have a lot of time for anything else when you’re trying to keep unwanted guests out of your house for five years straight.”

Dorothea rolled her eyes. “Oh, sure. By all means, regale me with the tales of your exploits on the front lines. There you go, Sylvain: a new way to get girls to fall into bed with you, free of charge.”

‘Free of charge.’ Suddenly, this conversation was treading even more disturbing waters than before.

Sylvain shrugged, gestured suddenly at Ingrid, and—oh, merciful Seiros, she knew exactly where this was going. _I told you not to, I told you not to, Goddess damn it, I told you not to._ But Sylvain was either ignorant, or adamantly playing at ignorance. And he was, it would seem, determined.

“Hey, I could talk all day about my exploits, and you probably _would _fall straight into my bed.”

“My, aren’t you sure of yourself?” Dorothea muttered in something Ingrid would later learn was typically termed a stage whisper.

“But what you should really be hearing about are Ingrid’s exploits.” There it was. Sylvain tried to catch Ingrid’s gaze as he spoke; Ingrid, for her part, took the opportunity to glare straight into his face. Sylvain plowed adamantly on, “You should have seen some of the stuff she did on our way back here. She even took down a fully grown bear all by herself!”

Not one of Ingrid’s more pleasant memories; her throat tightened at the mention of it. And ‘fully grown bear’ was, she supposed, technically the correct way to term it. It had been hungry and soon, it had been angry. It had also been an elderly, half-starved male bear with cataracts completely glazing over one of its eyes and at least three of its front claws missing (Ingrid hadn’t really been counting; trying to avoid getting torn open by any of the ones still remaining had made much more pressing demands upon her attention). And yes, it had been a pretty difficult fight, but she _knew _that the image conjured up by Sylvain’s bare bones depiction of it was going to conflict with what actually happened.

And before she could _say _any of that, Dorothea was turning a somewhat astonished gaze upon her. “Did you really?”

Sylvain was grinning over Dorothea’s head. Ingrid sharply averted her gaze from him. “I—yes.”

“Huh.” Dorothea ran a gauntleted, slightly quivering hand through her hair. She breathed deep through her nose, nostrils flaring. “How… did that happen?”

Ingrid didn’t want to discuss it. She had the impression—not a certainty, but just looking at the tension that had suddenly started crackling in Dorothea’s shoulders, she had certain suspicions—that Dorothea didn’t particularly want to hear about it. Not while sober, anyways; alcohol might serve to take the edge off, if they could find any around here worth drinking. And in the interest of not discussing it now…

“I’ll tell you after we get back from heading out to meet up with our reinforcements.”

There. That gave them both a few days, Dorothea to reconcile herself, and Ingrid to steel herself. Ingrid could do no less.

Dorothea nodded to herself, but as soon as the tension had started to ease out of her shoulders, it flooded back in. “Right, Ailell.” A high-pitched jitter of a laugh escaped her mouth. “Are we… are we really going back there again?”

Unease settled over the room as a choking pall. The smile died off of Sylvain’s face as quickly as it had appeared. Dorothea fretted with the hem of a shirt sitting out on the table in front of her. Breathing became something that, for Ingrid, felt entirely too constricted, as if someone had put a vise over her heart.

Going back there, the idea didn’t feel quite real. It all felt fantastical, like something out of a bad dream, in spite of the fact that Ingrid had absolutely attended the briefing that confirmed Ailell as the place where they would be making contact with Lord Rodrigue. (She wondered, sometimes, if he’d scold her and Felix for running off, or if he would completely overlook that fact in favor of the fact that Dimitri had resurfaced and was in their company. It was hard to tell, with Lord Rodrigue, just what would take priority. But these were passing fancies, and could not distract her from her thoughts for long.)

_I don’t want—_

It wouldn’t be like last time. This time, Ingrid was going back there in the company of a force of seasoned warriors, in the company of the _Knights of Seiros_. And they wouldn’t be doing battle there, just rendezvousing with an ally. It wouldn’t be like last time.


	4. Chapter Four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [**CN/TW**: Blood, references to human trafficking, references to sex trafficking, references to sexual violence, misgendering as an expression of hostility, references to child abuse, misogyny, Ingrid’s borderline self-loathing when it comes to her reactions to trauma]

And in the end, Ingrid was right. Her second visit to Ailell hadn’t been like the last time. It had been worse. She was uncertain as to how that was even possible, but it had occurred anyways.

_I never wondered how much the reward was for my capture._

More than an hour after they had slain Lord Gwendal and the battle concluded, they were still moving at high speeds down the backwoods route they had taken to get there. The specter of any reinforcements Lord Gwendal had managed to summon before dying chased after them like the shadow of death.

_Even when Sylvain and Felix and I were chased out of Galatea territory, I never wondered how much the reward was for my capture. It just—_

_I didn’t think about it. I didn’t want to._

(It was nearly the same amount of money as the bride price that man had offered her father.)

Curls and jets of red still plucked at the edges of Ingrid’s vision. She did not need to look around to know that if she did, Ailell would still be visible on the horizon, glowing sullenly like a hot coal wanting to burst into flame. She spurred Kyphon on, and willed herself to focus only on the skies turning indigo and showing the faintest twinkling of stars that sprawled out ahead of her. (At least up in the skies there were less people around to sense her weakness.)

Hours later, under the pearly, frigid light of the Pegasus Moon, the force at last stopped for the night. They had passed into Charon territory sometime after the sun had finally sank in full below the western horizon (Winter days were shorter in hours, but it had been a long time since Ingrid had last lived through a day as long as this one). Catherine insisted that House Rowe’s forces wouldn’t pursue them this far into the territory of a house not allied with Cornelia and her men (Charon having more ability than Galatea to repel invaders), and that her father, Count Charon, wouldn’t send outriders to harry them. The forest clearing their party had stopped in would, it was hoped, be safe for the night.

Ingrid sent Kyphon off to be corralled with the other pegasi, then beat a swift retreat to the outskirts of the encampment. Even with the moon waxing almost to fullness, and not a cloud in sight, the winter night was still a dark one, and she trusted it to hide her face. She missed the number of people who outright stared at her as she passed. Pulse roaring in her ears like the booming tide of the ocean against the shore, she was rendered deaf to the few who called out to her. Quiet, she needed quiet. Solitude, she needed that just as much.

Just past the edge of the clearing, where the pines and firs were yet scattered sparsely and provided enough space between their scaly trunks to make passage a small feat, there was a boulder. Some nine feet tall, it jutted upwards towards the sky, tapering to a point crowned with flaky patches of lichen. There were boulders like this scattered all about the moors in Galatea territory, and Ingrid caught herself trying to catch a darkling glimmer of a kettle pond at night, the smooth surface of the water turned to glinting obsidian, before she stopped herself.

Beaten down by wind and rain and untold eons of time, the boulder was as smooth to the touch as any stone would have been after being tumbled and polished by an artisan. It rippled under the trailing touch of her hand, dipping and jutting and never forming an edge sharp enough to cut. For some reason, that fact somewhat irritated Ingrid. Maybe it was the way she could feel her blood jumping in her veins. She would have liked to contend with something that could cut.

Coming around to the far side of the boulder, Ingrid found something she did not expect. There was a deep, concave depression in the boulder, stopping just a few inches shy of the tapered tip. Its lower boundary was maybe three feet shy of the ground, and the surface within the boulder, at that lower boundary, was perfectly flat. That surface was carpeted in lichen, not the flaky stuff that crowned the boulder, but a denser, springier specimen. The dark made it impossible to discern color, but when Ingrid chanced removing her glove for just a few moments, it felt soft and fresh to the touch, as if winter had never come for it.

Come to mention it, the boulder, though soaked through with cold, was completely untouched by snow or ice. The snow seemed completely unable to touch it.

Something wary and shifting began to tug at Ingrid’s mind once again. Looking at the boulder, she realized that it reminded her somewhat of the massive throne in the depths of the Holy Tomb, though she was uncertain as to just what compelled her to make the comparison.

It was remote from the camp, and sitting down in the depression would give Ingrid the solitude she had sought. She was being foolish. She sat down, letting her feet dangle a few inches off of the ground, tipped her head back, and looked up. All the noises emanating from the encampment died out of her hearing as Ingrid stared through tree branches to survey the broken pieces of the sky.

The cold of the boulder sank through Ingrid’s cape, her breastplate, her gambeson and shirt, sapping any heat from her chest. Puffs of glittering silver twinkled in the air after each exhale. Ingrid’s fingertips were beginning to go just a touch numb. She felt as if her face was licked by flame.

_I should be stronger than this._

_I should be able to put Ailell to rest._

_It was a normal battle, no different than any we’ve fought these past five years._

_It’s been years since he—_

“Oh, so this is where you snuck off to.”

That the boulder was so massive was, Ingrid supposed, a good thing, as it meant that her head didn’t hit the top of the depression when she jumped. Her mind was still trying to form thoughts more coherent than a jumbled mess of _what too dark didn’t hear not alone not alone_ when Dorothea swept her long skirt and sat down at Ingrid’s side on the lichen-cushioned depression.

There was enough light for Ingrid to see what Dorothea was smiling at her, but not enough light to make out anything about the quality of her smile, or any other facet of her expression. There was a slight tremble in her shoulders. That could have been from the cold.

“I saw footprints in the snow, and decided to follow them,” Dorothea explained, seemingly taking Ingrid’s silence for something other than what it was. “We can’t take the risk of enemy scouts reporting our location.” Something twisted in her smile. “But I found you, instead. A much more pleasant surprise.”

“I…” Ingrid reminded herself that they were alone, that there was no one else close enough nearby to hear her make the admission, and after a while, these reminders were enough to unstop her tongue. “…I think I may be too tired to run down a scout.”

“So am I,” Dorothea agreed.

And for a while, they sat there in silence, staring up at the stars, soaking up the cold to the point where, at least to Ingrid, it felt like they might just become part of the boulder if they continued sitting there through the night.

Slowly, ever so slowly, some of the tension Ingrid hadn’t even realized was locking her spine ramrod straight began to bleed out of it. Dorothea had been with her both times she had done battle and evaded capture in Ailell. This was not a stranger who would see her weakness and judge her (_not a stalwart knight, not a dignified lady, just a sniveling—_)… wanting. There was some refuge to be found in her company.

Just another couple of days, and they would be back at Garreg Mach. She knew she shouldn’t be reassured by its holiness, knew that it had been laid low once before, but something about the idea of returning to a holy place soothed her. (That feeling would evaporate, she knew, when the broken spires and scorched and battered skeleton of Garreg Mach began to cut the sky to ribbons before her. She would hold into the feeling, for now.) At the very least, her bed awaited her there.

Beside her, Dorothea let out a sigh that could have done a passable job substituting for the missing wind. “So, that was Lord Gwendal.”

“…Yes. I’ve met him a few times before.” And weathered his fury once before (Ingrid regretted, sometimes, that Galatea territory and Lord Gwendal’s castle were so far away from each other, and that he was so reluctant to let his daughter travel too far from his side; she suspected that she and Eiluned might have gotten on reasonably well). “He was a knight to the very end. I doubt he would wish for us to mourn him.”

“’A knight to the end,’” Dorothea repeated, in such a tone as if she was testing how the words would fit in her mouth. She folded her right arm against her chest, setting her left elbow on her right palm and pressing the fingertips of her left hand against the side of her head. Her hands were gloved, but for a moment, just a moment, Ingrid saw a glint of silver. “He certainly tried to kill us all to the very end. Even the man he should have recognized as his king.”

_Not this again. Not now._

“He kept faith with his liege lord,” Ingrid said stiffly, “as he should have. Lord Gwendal took his vows of knighthood very seriously. In times like these, it’s rare to find men like him.”

Dorothea shook her head violently, her earrings (_why didn’t anyone warn her about what those can do to her skin in heat or cold?_) catching what little light could be found in their perch. “So he’ll follow his vows, even if following them means committing treason?” she asked dubiously. “Wouldn’t he have been executed at the end of the war if Dimitri wins and he had survived? Maybe he should have been thinking a bit harder about just what he wanted the future of his land to be—“ here, her voice turned sharp, though without the brightness that usually accompanied the sharpness “—because I don’t think he was thinking about that very much at all. It sounds a lot more like the only thing he was thinking about, the only thing he _cared _about, was killing as many people as got within range of his axe as he could. That doesn’t sound like a true knight to me, Ingrid. That just sounds like a butcher.”

“He was loyal—“

“Did you ever hear very much about the suppression of the rebellion in Bartels territory, just after the war began?” Now, the sharpness had bled from Dorothea’s voice, leaving something soft and bloodless and saturated with the horror of knowledge, and it stopped Ingrid cold. “I’ve heard the Death Knight led that one. I hear the men he commanded were very loyal to him. I’ve also heard of what those loyal men did there. Have you?”

_They’re the enemy. When a ruler is a tyrant, the rot flows downward from her. Who expects _her _men to fight with honor?_

But even as those words coalesced in Ingrid’s mind, they began to shake and pull apart. Dorothea had lived under the rule of Emperor Edelgard for years, and it had eroded not one thing about her, let alone her honor—she had come here of her own will, left her comfortable life in Enbarr to come fight a war against her own unjust ruler. The same could be said of every one of Dorothea’s classmates who’d joined her. Dimitri greeted their arrival with deep hostility, the Knights of Seiros didn’t bother hiding their distrust, but Ingrid knew the sort of risks they had taken just coming to Garreg Mach, knew the sort of sacrifices they must have made.

_They swore no vows of knighthood._

_They risked everything to come here._

_I would have been disgusted if they had kept faith with Edelgard._

_I had no cause to expect them not to keep faith with Edelgard._

_That wasn’t a decision made by my mind._

_I—_

Not right now. She did not need to be having that kind of conversation before she had had a chance to gather her thoughts.

“May we speak of this later?” Ingrid asked, praying her voice didn’t sound as fractured as it seemed to her own ears. “I think we both have more pressing concerns, at present.”

“Sure,” Dorothea agreed, readily enough. “And Ingrid, I’d like it if you got some sleep—“ her voice softened, not the bloodless softness of terrible knowledge, but a human softness tinged with fatigue “—sometime soon. You may not realize it, but you’re looking a bit rough. I don’t want you getting hurt in an ambush because you didn’t get enough sleep.”

“I… will. Thank you, Dorothea.”

And then, because it was bubbling up in her chest like lava, threatening to cook her from the inside out if she didn’t give it a voice, “Dorothea… do you remember the last time we did battle at Ailell?”

“Vividly,” was the reply, in a flat tone as if Dorothea very much wished she didn’t.

“Do you…” Why was she still so weak? “I…”

A hand lit on Ingrid’s shoulder, firm, but gentle. “Hey, it’s okay. I…” Dorothea broke off, chuckled darkly. “I’m not saying I don’t think you’d get _any _judgment for it. I think there’s plenty of men back in camp who’d judge you for it. But I think it’s okay to still be bothered by it. What happened was just…” There was just enough light for Ingrid to see Dorothea’s face contorting. “…Vile.”

Ingrid ought to thank her; she knew that. She also knew that she could scour her mind from top to bottom, and find no words capable of being sounded.

In the dark, looked down upon by the distant, uncaring stars, they looked at each other. Dorothea’s features were indistinct in the dark, once her expression was no longer an exaggerated, theatrical one; it was difficult even to discern the vivid green of her eyes. They both melded into the shadows of the boulder, a union that rubbed uneasily against Ingrid’s skin, though the idea of it was not entirely unpleasant. That sort of union was something she had wanted in the misty past. She still wanted it now, even though there were presented to her so few ways to achieve it and retain honor at the same time.

_It dishonors us both. And we do not see the world the same way. But still, I wish it._

Ingrid wondered, sometimes, just how much her heart and her mind spoke to one another. Tonight, she wondered if they were on speaking terms at all.

“Hold on, Ingrid.” Dorothea was leaning forward suddenly, slipping her glove off of her right hand. “You’ve got some… I think it’s ash, on your face.”

Her hand was cold as ice against Ingrid’s skin as she rubbed the ash away, but the jolt that had coursed through her body at the touch had little to do with the cold they were already shrouded in.

At that moment, Ingrid’s rational mind chose to flee her completely, and what guided the impulse that saw her tilting her face closer to Dorothea’s, she couldn’t have said. She was tired. It had been one of the longest days of her life, and—_You were by my side, both times, and never fled._

As she drew closer, Ingrid could feel the weak, fleeting warmth of Dorothea’s breath on her face. The sheer cold of the Pegasus Moon, even when drawing near to its end, muted most smells into nothing, but Ingrid could pick up on something from this close. Dorothea didn’t smell of her sweet, floral perfume. Smoke and ash and blood clung to her hair and her coat; even Ingrid wouldn’t normally have counted it a pleasant mix, but tonight it made her head spin, made it hard not to simply surge forward.

Dorothea, meanwhile, had gone completely still.

Until she wasn’t still anymore, until she was springing to her feet, and even in the dark, Ingrid could see that her shoulders were up nearly to her ears and her hands, one gloved and one bare, were fidgeting with one of her coat buttons.

“We’ll talk more about it later,” Dorothea told her. The casual tone of her voice held buried within it a high-pitched hitch akin to nothing so much as the squeal of a rusted hinge. Ingrid didn’t think she’d ever heard any such thing in Dorothea’s voice before. “And really, Ingrid, try to get some sleep. Closer to a fire than this, _please_.”

And Ingrid was left alone in the dark with her own confusion.

-0-0-0-

After that, her intention had been to take to avoiding Dorothea again. The woman was completely baffling; Ingrid couldn’t make heads or tails of her intentions. Avoiding the situation was not the most courageous way she could have dealt with it, but there lingered in the back of her mind a worry that had started to grow up over the past few days—_what if it’s all in my head, what if I’m wrong and Sylvain’s wrong and she really isn’t interested at all and I’ll only drive her further away by pressing forward. _She oughtn’t be propelled in any one direction solely by her worries, but given how remote the chances of this ending in anything permanent were to start with, maybe she could be forgiven, just this once?

(Excused, maybe. Ingrid didn’t think she was going to be forgetting it anytime soon. Or forgiving it.)

No resolution, none at all. They hadn’t finished the conversation they’d started on that boulder, and to be honest, Ingrid wasn’t looking forward to that one, at whatever point in the future when it would stop looming in the distance and walk up to meet her. Dorothea had never explained what, in full, it was like being an opera singer in Mittelfrank, why she had spoken of it with such deep-seated ambivalence. Dorothea had never explained by she had left Mittelfrank and Enbarr behind her. Ingrid had never even explained, not in full, the story of the bear that had stormed her and Sylvain and Felix’s campsite while they were making the journey south to Garreg Mach.

No resolution, and well, it would hardly be the first time in her life that Ingrid had endured a lack of resolution. She’d live.

Or maybe she wouldn’t have to.

The note had been slid under Ingrid’s door, and as she read it, she immediately recognized Sylvain’s handwriting (surprisingly even, surprisingly polished): _Come meet me at the entrance hall, now. Bring money._

“What has he done _now_?” Ingrid muttered to herself, trapped between bewilderment and the beginnings of exasperation.

‘Bring money,’ huh? Somehow, Ingrid couldn’t conjure up a single scenario in her own mind where that didn’t signify something that had gone _badly _wrong in one of Sylvain’s attempted seductions. One of the things he pretty much never did was hit her up (or hit anyone else up, as far as Ingrid knew) for money, but there always had to be a first time.

_I ought to let him sort it out on his own, _she thought to herself, as she crossed the short distance to her desk. _I should really stop solving his girl problems for him_, she thought, as she reached for her (not terribly substantial in terms of contents) purse. _Goddess only knows why he wants me to bring _money_, of all things_.

The best case scenario was that he he’d agreed to pay for a woman’s dinner and then forgotten to take money with him. The worst case scenario was that Ingrid was going to be called upon to pay weregild to an angry relative on behalf of their sister or daughter or niece or whatever’s lost virginity. Everything that seethed in between best and worst swirled in her head as an ocean unto itself. You’d think there wouldn’t be that many possibilities, but, well, Sylvain had gotten himself into some utterly ridiculous situations in his time. And Ingrid had been around to witness and (sometimes more grudgingly than others) defuse most of them.

_We’ll talk after I’ve figured out what’s going on._

That talking might include shouting. It depended on exactly what was going on.

Ingrid took her purse and, just to be safe, her sword with her to the entrance hall. _If it’s someone like Lord Gwendal or the peasant with the pitchfork again, a sword might not be enough. _But she would deal with that once the situation arose. And now that Lord Rodrigue’s men were here, there were more guards around the monastery proper. If it came down to a fight, she could at least be assured of backup.

When Ingrid arrived at the entrance hall, Sylvain… was not there. He was absent from the upper level, and there was neither hide nor hair of him in the lower level. As Ingrid mounted the stairs back up to the upper level, a cold draught wafted past her. On it was carried a scent of sweet, floral perfume.

For a moment, there was a possibility of evasion. Dorothea was standing with her back to the stairs, and if Ingrid had been quiet, she could have just gone right back down those stairs and been out of the door before Dorothea noticed. But for all the skills Ingrid had acquired through years upon years of weapons and battle training, stealth had never been among them. Stealth had never been a skill that she had thought appropriate for a knight. Dorothea turned round, and Ingrid was rooted to the spot she occupied at the top of the stairs.

Ingrid still had little capacity to describe women’s dresses in any terms beyond the most basic. Dorothea’s dress was a floaty, shimmery lavender silk, it was certainly appropriate to neither the battlefield, the weather, nor a church service, and Ingrid could say nothing more about it that would have made sense to literally anyone listening to her. Dorothea’s neck and wrists glinted with jewelry, deep violet stones strung on silk thread, and Ingrid was grateful for the distraction their glinting provided from the… the dress.

_I have been associating with Sylvain for too long_. Her face was burning—at least the light in the entrance hall was poor, at this time of day. _I should not have been having these thoughts._

“Oh, Ingrid,” Dorothea called out, in a perfectly normal voice, as if she wasn’t wearing that dress and as if Ingrid’s face was burning for innocent reasons. “Have you been training? You look a bit…” She pursed her lips, which were a bit redder than usual and glistened in the lamplight. “…Flushed.”

“Something like that.” Well, at least she could still speak properly. “What are you doing here at this hour?” _Dressed like you’re going to attend a party in Enbarr? _And she could only guess that that was the fashion in Enbarr, since Dorothea had never struck her as the sort of person who would willingly wear unfashionable clothing outside the privacy of her own room. “Are you meeting someone?”

Dorothea sighed gustily, lifting her left hand to brush a lock of hair back over her shoulder, where it belonged. Her sleeves broke away at the elbow, leaving her hands and forearms bare and exposing a smattering of dark moles and one or two pearly scars. The ring glittered as it caught the light, and Ingrid’s stomach churned as she tried her best not to look at it. “Yes,” she admitted plainly. “At least, I thought I was. The someone in question has yet to show his—“

“Oh, hey, there you are!”

Ingrid was beginning to understand her situation, as much as she wished she didn’t, when Sylvain picked that moment to emerge from the dining hall. Sylvain, for his part, was being a little more circumspect about looking Ingrid’s way this time. He’d looked a bit harried as he had appeared in the doorway, but as he locked eyes with Dorothea, his face melted into a smile considerably less lascivious than what he normally favored women with in such a situation as this. “Hey, you weren’t kidding when you said you’d dress to bring the house down. You look great.”

And Dorothea herself seemed to sense that this wasn’t the typical reaction, for she regarded him in both-eyebrows-raised silence for a long moment. “And you look very late,” she remarked tartly. “Did you have to go all the way back to your house to pick up your charm, or is this a tactic to make me desperate? I suppose it could be both, of course.”

_Oh, please, not the ‘charm’ again._ Ingrid stepped forward, finding words more easily than she had the last time she was trapped between the two of them. “’Very late?’” Her eyes locked on to Sylvain, and could only hope that they looked enough like green fire as she was trying to make them. “What’s going on?”

“One of the restaurants in town just reopened,” Dorothea explained, folding her arms across her chest and pointedly ignoring Sylvain. “A certain someone promised he’d pay for a meal if I’d go with him—and those were his exact words; I wonder if he’s sick,” she speculated, voice turning sing-song towards the end.

“I’m right here,” Sylvain reminded them.

Dorothea ignored him. “And now he’s about, oh, twenty minute late.”

Ingrid’s stomach flipped as she began to understand yet a little more about the situation she was in.

“And I’m sorry,” Sylvain assured her—though to Ingrid’s ears, it sounded like he was assuring them both. “I’ve got guard duty tonight; I completely forgot.” And Ingrid would be proud of him for finally prioritizing his duties over his womanizing, if not for what he said immediately after that. “But Ingrid’s here.” He was directly acknowledging her presence now, gesturing in her direction without ever quite meeting her gaze. “You should see how she gets about food. I bet she’d be glad to go with you instead.”

Sometimes, Ingrid wished Sylvain didn’t know her quite as well as he did. He knew how she got about food—and he knew _why _she got that way, as well. (Ingrid didn’t remember when she first realized that all of her family’s soups were watered down while hers were still thick, didn’t remember when she first noticed how much smaller their portions were than hers. She remembered vividly the year the crops failed, remembered when her portions grew as small and her soup as watered-down as what her parents, brothers, and paternal grandmother endured.) He also knew that she wasn’t just going to _leave _Dorothea to make her way to this restaurant in the dark, by herself. They’d rooted out as many of the thieves around Garreg Mach as they could, but the town was not a small one, and everyone who saw Dorothea dressed as she was would judge her (wrongly, but still) a vulnerable target.

(That dress made her look even more like the Maiden of the Wind than the dress she’d been wearing when they reunited. There were no words for how unfair that was.)

At this moment, Ingrid not only wished that Sylvain did not know her as well as he did, but that he did not know her at all.

_We’ve had no resolution._

_I can’t just leave her._

_Do we share any of the same ideals at all?_

She could not just shirk her obligations, even the ones foisted upon her. (Though she might have to ‘invite’ Sylvain to spar later so that she might make clear just what she thought of this latest attempt.) Ingrid nodded firmly, to _Dorothea _and not Sylvain. “If you don’t mind my joining you, then I’d be happy to accompany you there.”

The warmth of the smile that Dorothea bestowed upon Ingrid felt as if it was meant for her alone, out of everyone in the world, and despite knowing that she shouldn’t, Ingrid couldn’t help but bask in it. “That would be lovely, Ingrid, thank you.” With a sly look halfway back towards Sylvain, “I can’t say I enjoy being hit on while I’m trying to eat, so I’d rather go with someone more interested in the food.”

“Glad that worked out,” Sylvain said blithely, so blithely that Ingrid honestly could have punched him in the face. As he retreated back into the dining hall, he called out, “I’ll see you two later.”

Oh, yes, there was definitely going to be a sparring match in Sylvain’s future.

“Shall we go?” Dorothea ventured, with the sort of deliberate dignity that made Ingrid think that this was _far _from the first time she had ever had a date bail on her. The scalloped edges of her iridescent, hanging sleeves fluttered like insect wings as she passed Ingrid by and started down the stairs.

It took Ingrid a moment before she could convince her legs to move again. “Yes, let’s.” At least this time her voice only sounded a little faint to her own ears. “I imagine that restaurant is very popular, right now. It’ll be harder to find empty seats the later we leave.”

As they were heading for the doorway, Dorothea’s eyes strayed to the sword hilted at Ingrid’s hip. “Oh, you’re even armed. My sweet Ingrid, are you acting as my protector tonight, too?”

She was flirting again. She was flirting… again.

“If… necessary.”

Ingrid couldn’t imagine how red her face must have been. Dorothea didn’t seem to notice.

Crimson and ochre and a dull gold streaked the sky as they descended the monastery proper into the town, everything beneath the rooftops doused in dense shadow. There were more people here than there had been when the Knights of Seiros first made their return to the monastery, but all that meant for the town nestled within the outer walls was that Ingrid caught sight of furtive shadows darting in and out of the alleys at the corners of her vision from time to time. There were times when Ingrid wondered if the monastery would ever recover, or if, even after the war had been won and the archbishop rescued, Garreg Mach would continue to fade into a ghost of fear and a shadow of regret. If holiness would, in time, be given over entirely to desolation.

There was no opportunity to avert her gaze away from this desolation, either. The route Dorothea had chosen to get to the restaurant was a circuitous one, though Ingrid could not find it in herself to question why this was. They walked down narrow alleys and through the abandoned high street, and it was painfully clear just how diminished this place was from its heyday.

_I want to believe that this place will one day be as it was. _But Ingrid was realistic, too, and had lived a life that taught her to have an eye towards practicality and _budget_. To restore the monastery and the town in entirety would be exorbitantly expensive. The Church of Seiros was many things, but they were _not _an organization that could get away with not paying construction workers or artisans. They especially couldn’t get away with press-ganging construction workers or artisans and not letting them leave until the repairs were done, since it had been a past archbishop who had _personally _instituted laws outlawing slavery in all forms on every inch of ground in Fódlan. The Church, of all institutions, could not get away with not paying workers properly, let alone forcing them to work.

And yet, Ingrid could see few ways for construction workers and artisans to be properly paid, not right now. On the very day that the Knights of Seiros had returned to Garreg Mach, it had been discovered that the monastery’s coffers had been completely emptied out at some point since this place was abandoned. Whether it was the Empire or bandits did not truly mattered; the fault traced itself back to the Empire, and its ruler.

_After a replacement for Edelgard has been installed, I imagine the Church will take the price of restoring the monastery out of the Imperial treasury’s hide._

The idea wasn’t as satisfying as it could have been. Ingrid could not shake the idea of knowing, deep down, just who in Enbarr would suffer the most for the loss of the exorbitant sum the Church would likely requisition from the Imperial treasury.

And, as if Dorothea had read Ingrid’s mind, she sighed heavily. “It’s such a shame that the monastery’s like this. It was so peaceful when we attended the Officers Academy, but now—“ she grimaced, the expression just barely visible in the dying light “—it reminds me a lot more of the necropolis in Enbarr.”

They were passing through a square that Ingrid remembered as being packed full of vendors selling produce on Saturdays. Now, it was empty but for a few scattered, broken carts and the cracked skeleton of a parched fountain, and entirely too silent for Ingrid’s comfort. “A… necropolis?”

“The word means ‘city of the dead,’” Dorothea explained lightly, as if she hadn’t said exactly what had just come out of her mouth. “Everyone in Enbarr is buried there when they die, even the emperors. It’s in the southeastern quarter of the city, and the gravediggers have recently started digging up peasants’ bodies and paying people to dump them in the ocean to save on space.”

She was so good at making her voice sound casual. She was so good at making her voice sound like anything she wanted it to, anything at all, that there were times when Ingrid had difficulty separating the genuine from the false. But there was an edge to Dorothea’s voice that could have put a scratch on a diamond, and somehow, Ingrid thought she had been meant to hear it.

“Why are they allowed to do such a thing?” Ingrid pressed her, in lieu of addressing that edge. “The dead should be given enough respect as to be allowed _rest_, surely.”

Dorothea tossed off a shrug. “The poor mean nothing to the powerful in Enbarr. Even in death, we mean nothing to them. They could trample over our corpses in the street and never notice, and no one else would ever dream of telling them to stop.”

_We…_

“The necropolis is not a place where you should be so cavalier about _anything_,” Dorothea went on, “but I suppose it was only a matter of time before they got to be this brazen.” Then, she turned her head to Ingrid, smiling evenly, and saying, just as evenly, “Don’t look at him.”

“Look… at who?”

In just as even a voice as before, “The man who’s been following us.”

Ingrid stiffened. Inside of half a second later, she was trying to look over her shoulder when Dorothea grabbed her arm and glared. Okay, she’d abstain, for now. “Is it Sylvain?” she half-whispered.

Dorothea tucked her arm through the crook of Ingrid’s elbow. “No, I don’t think so,” she muttered. “He’s not tall enough to be Sylvain, and his gait is different, too. I first noticed him in the marketplace at the foot of the stairs. When he started walking behind us, I didn’t think that much about it at first; this is the only way to get into the town.” She audibly bit back a sigh, the noise barely escaping through gritted teeth. “But we’ve taken five turns since we got here, and he’s gone the same way as us every time. This isn’t the quickest way to get to the restaurant; we’d be there by now if I’d picked the quickest route. He’s _definitely _following us.”

They were surrounded on all sides by dark buildings, some windows boarded up, others blasted out and the jagged shards still in the frames glinting in the ruddy light of twilight, and all of them too dark for Ingrid to tell if there was anyone standing behind them. “Well, it’s two against one,” Ingrid pointed out hopefully, “and you can attack at _range_. I’d call those easy odds.”

Even in the fast-growing dark, it was impossible to miss the alarm that flared in Dorothea’s eyes. “Are you _crazy_?!” she hissed, tightening her grip on Ingrid’s arm as they kept making their way across the mostly-empty square. “We don’t know how many other men might be lurking around here just waiting for his signal.”

“Well, what would you _suggest _we do?” Ingrid fired back.

Dorothea’s breathing grew ragged. “I… I don’t know. There were always more people around in Enbarr. There was always a crowd I could lose them in or a shop I could hide in until they lost interest. There’s nothing like that he—Oh!” she exclaimed, hastily painting false cheer into her voice. “Good evening, sir!”

Ingrid looked up and froze, her breath catching in her throat.

A burst of light ignited in the dark, and for a few moments, that light was all that Ingrid could see, burned into her eyelids. Before her eyes had properly adjusted to the sudden light, she heard a man’s voice say smoothly, “And good evening to you, Miss.”

When Ingrid’s eyes finally adjusted, she saw that there was a many standing in the entry into the alley she and Dorothea had been heading towards. The light came from a lantern that had recently been lit and hung up on a nearby post, and it illuminated a stranger who was, Ingrid thought, much better-dressed than many of the people who had come to the town since the Knights of Seiros had returned to the monastery. His clothes were not rough or threadbare, but a thick, soft wool dyed a dark green, and he wore a black cloak lined with what looked like rabbit fur. He was clean-shaven, his features utterly regular and ordinary—a man who would never have stood out in a crowd, a man whose features you would have had to put in an extraordinary amount of effort to remember.

Well, the eyes were not quite what Ingrid was used to from the local villagers. They were dark, so very dark, and they glittered strangely as he looked Dorothea and Ingrid—but especially Dorothea—up and down.

It was only Dorothea’s grip on Ingrid’s arm, the way she squeezed her arm suddenly, so tightly that Ingrid half-expected the muscle beneath Dorothea hand to pop out from under Ingrid’s skin, that kept Ingrid from going for her sword then and there.

Meanwhile, the man smiled, an expression that might have been pleasant if not for the way the look in his eyes just never changed. “What are you two young ladies doing out alone this late?” The accent sounded like southwestern Faerghus, though it was diluted with something else Ingrid couldn’t place. “This place has been a haven for lowlifes ever since the Knights first left. It’s not safe.”

Dorothea gave Ingrid’s arm another, mildly gentler squeeze, before saying brightly, “Oh, you shouldn’t worry about us, sir. We know our way around here.”

The man nodded patiently, as if he had heard the same thing a hundred times before. “I’m sure you did know your way around here five years ago, but I’m afraid you might find that things have changed since then.”

Footsteps sounded behind them on the broken cobblestones. Multiple sets of footsteps.

When Ingrid looked over her shoulder (Dorothea never did, though Ingrid felt her stiffen), there were three men standing outside of the shallow pool of light cast by the lantern. Ingrid couldn’t make out facial features in the dark, but she could see that two of the men had swords clipped to their belts, and the third had something that looked like the head of an axe poking up behind his right shoulder.

“Huh,” one of them muttered. He was looking at Ingrid. “Thought that one was a boy.”

“Just as well,” another replied. “They’re not looking for boys right now. Better for us.”

An icy spike of fear pierced Ingrid’s stomach at the same time as anger began to burn in her mind, swimming behind her eyes like lava. _Do I look like an easy target to you? _“You don’t want trouble with us,” she warned lowly, letting her hand rest now on the hilt of her sword.

“I’m sure all of you gentlemen would prefer getting in somewhere out of the cold,” Dorothea chirped, and no matter how long Ingrid searched for fear in her voice, she couldn’t find it, could only assume it was too deeply buried. “I understand the inn on Market Street has reopened; I’m certain you could all find lodgings there.”

One of the men standing behind them laughed wolfishly. “Care to join me there, girl?”

Before Ingrid could snap out a retort—_how _dare _you?!_—the man standing in the lantern light, the probable leader of this group, shook his head. “There’ll be none of that tonight.” But Ingrid wasn’t fool enough to take solace in those words, and sure enough, the next words only dug deeper into her stomach. “You see, ladies, it’s gotten to be very difficult for a man to make an honest living around here.” His regular, ordinary features momentarily darkened into something considerably more memorable. “Got highbrow folks like yourselves to thank for that. It’s pretty hard to make an honest living these days, so this road is now a toll road.”

“Is it?” Ingrid barely recognized the sound of her own voice. It was… strange, wooden. “I don’t remember any new ordinances being passed. We would normally receive some sort of notice up at the monastery.”

If Ingrid had expected the mention of the monastery and implications of what it represented to make the men think better of their intentions (and she wasn’t certain that she had), she was sorely mistaken. The man gave a barking laugh, his fur-lined cloak quivering slightly. “This isn’t the hour of the lawmaker, girl. This is the hour of the man who takes what he needs to survive.” He leered. “It’s the hour of the man who takes what he wants.”

“Is that so?” All at once, the bright, almost sing-song conciliation vanished from Dorothea’s voice, leaving behind only the sharpness of a naked blade. “Oh, dear, it seems no one ever bothered to tell you that you can’t always get what you want.”

The man behind them weren’t making a move. Waiting for a signal, maybe?

Another barking laugh. “And I’d say no one’s ever told you you can’t talk your way out of every situation you get yourself into.”

Dorothea’s eyes widened, feigning an innocence not strong enough to take the tension out of her shoulders. “That situation being?”

“That situation being that neither of you are gonna see this place again for—“

It happened before anyone could react, let alone Ingrid. One moment, the man was talking, and the next, there was a high, strident scream of magical power, a near-overwhelming smell of ozone, and then the actually overwhelming odor of cooking meat. (It had smelled so good. Ingrid would think of that, later. It would be impossible not to think about it without nausea twisting her stomach into a knot.) The man stayed upright, now-sightless eyes locked on Dorothea’s face. Then, the corpse staggered. Then, it fell.

And for a moment, a moment that felt like it stretched on for a millennium, there was silence. The only noise to break it was the surprisingly meager thud when the corpse hit the cracked cobblestones. Ingrid just stared at it, her pulse throbbing so hard in her neck that it almost hurt. It wasn’t that she didn’t comprehend what had just happened. She’d been in enough battles by now to know what a corpse looked like, and how you made one. But still, her arms and legs were locked, and her mouth was dry of speech.

_That man, he just said—_

But then, Dorothea sucked in a shuddering breath. She disentangled her arm from Ingrid’s, never meeting Ingrid’s gaze, and turned to face the other three men who had been silent all this time as well. “Anyone else?” she asked, in tones of cheer so noxious they could have eaten through metal.

As one, the men drew their weapons.

Half a second later, Ingrid drew hers.

It should have been a simple fight. Even three against two, Ingrid trusted in her and Dorothea’s superior training to see them through without incident. The first man went down easily. Somewhere off in the dark, the sound of a man’s terrified scream, cut off mid-note, signaled a second death.

That just left Ingrid and the third man, circling cautiously around each other, swords drawn. This one was big. Ingrid and fought and won against bigger men, but it was also dark, the sky starting to turn to indigo, and she could not guess at his strength. _I need an opening. Does he limp? How heavily armed is he, where can I strike…_

A flash of iridescence caught the corner of Ingrid’s eye. Dorothea had finished up with her man, Dorothea was approaching, Dorothea was just a few feet behind her. That added a new dimension to this: when would Dorothea make the decision to strike, and from what angle could Ingrid attack that wouldn’t put her in the line of fire from Dorothea’s magic?

“Kajus’ll be glad when I bring him the two of you,” the man exulted, as if he wasn’t the last one left standing, as if he didn’t face off against one attacker with a sword and another that could strike him down at range. “Maybe you—“ he looked past Ingrid, briefly, to Dorothea “—more than the skinny little boy here, but—“ he broke off, laughed “—eh, the skinny little boys are always the most fun to break in. Skinny little boys and pretty ones with smart mouths, that’s what Kajus says.” Even in the dark, it was impossible to mistake his leer. “Wonder if he’ll let me join in?”

It was at that moment that Ingrid saw red.

Pain erupted in her shoulder as she charged the man down, but that pain was distant, unimportant. All that mattered was her blade, his flesh, the inevitable contact between the two until blood stopped flowing and her mind was quiet again of seething rage and _how dare you how dare you I am not a vessel for every lewd thought and petty desire that enters your head and neither is she_

She wasn’t sure how long she kept hacking away at the corpse. It could have been sheer exhaustion that saw her grip go suddenly slack and her sword clattering to the ground. It could have been something else entirely. Her eyes closed, and she was standing over a… a lump, an oozing lump, sucking in huge, gasping breaths as sweat gripped off of her chin.

From her shoulder, something else was dripping.

Ingrid tried to step away, and darkness swallowed her whole.

-0-0-0-

The darkness that swallowed her so quickly let her go only by inches, reluctantly, waiting in the wings for any other opportunity to swallow her that it could seize. When Ingrid first forced her eyes open, all she saw was fuzzy darkness that painted itself in varying shades of indistinct grayish-bluish-black. Her body was stiff, not the stiffness of going to sleep on a surface other than her bed, but the sort of stiffness that descended on her a few hours after training if she forgot to do her cool-down exercises—a reminder that always was there a price to pay for abusing her body without giving it its due. It was the sort of stiffness that promised soreness later, promised a near-total inability to, after having lied down on a soft surface, get up from it again without feeling like every fiber of muscle in her body was trying to pull apart and flee through her pores.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but she felt like shit.

As the world came back to Ingrid in inches, she became aware of a soft, silvery light hovering somewhere below her head. Or—not below, past; she was lying on her back on the ground, where cold seeped steadily through the thick wool surcoat she had thrown on in place of armor when she had gotten Sylvain’s note. Her back was nearly numb.

Her right shoulder, meanwhile, felt as if it had been set ablaze.

There had been…

In place of any comment she could have made, Ingrid made an indistinct noise of discomfort. Her mind was coming back to her a bit more quickly than her body, and she didn’t know if there had been more of those men lurking in the background in case something went wrong, and where was Dorothea, where was anyone—

“Oh, you’re awake.”

Ingrid’s hearing had not returned to her quite enough to make out _tone_, but it had returned enough for her to identify the speaker. She lifted her head just enough to see that the silvery light swirling at some point past her head was hovering about her right shoulder, and poured from a hand. Attached to that hand was a blurry figure that did not resolve itself to show clearly a _face_, but she did not need that. She knew the voice, and she knew the ring that glinted on the fourth finger of the hand.

“Do… Dorothea.” She swallowed, and found some greater strength with which to imbue her voice. “How long…”

“A few seconds.” Hearing was coming back to her in full, now, enough for Ingrid to pick up on the terseness of Dorothea’s tone. “That’s normal. That’s…” She paused, took a breath. “That’s good. When people faint, they usually wake up in a few seconds. A few minutes, at the most.” She looked Ingrid in the face for the first time, and though Ingrid’s sight was still a touch blurry, and the darkness helped that not at all, she thought she could discern something stony in Dorothea’s expression. “I picked up a few stronger healing spells after we left school. Lucky for you.”

“I… Thank you.”

Silence stretched out in the cold air as the silver light pulsed and the fire in Ingrid’s shoulder receded minutely. Much as she knew she shouldn’t, her mind began to stray to the wound. How long before she could start to train again? Would mobility be impeded at all? Would… Would…

Ingrid’s mind took a sharp right turn into ‘amputation,’ and once she finally managed to make it _stop_, she decided to stop speculating altogether.

Of course, now her mind decided to live in a house called ‘berserker rage,’ whose lintel was called ‘blind fury’ and whose hearth was named ‘killed for the safety of comrades.’ Her father’s great-uncle had been known to go into berserker rages during especially bloody battles. He had cut down ten of his allies before the archers filled him with enough arrows to put him down. No proper funeral for that one, no proper burial; they tossed his corpse, still bristling with arrows, down a ravine and let him rot there, unheralded by anything but the vultures and the wolves.

_That man, he said…_

_I am not an empty vessel. I don’t want to be broken open so others can pour their will inside._

_I am so tired._

“Do you think you can stand?” Dorothea asked, before almost immediately cutting herself off and asserting, “No, it doesn’t matter if you feel like getting up—we can’t stay out here. We need to find somewhere more sheltered.”

“I’ll be alri—“

“Shut up,” Dorothea snapped. She squeezed her eyes shut, gritted her teeth in a thin flash of white in the dark. “Just… shut up. _Don’t _try to get up by yourself; let me help you.”

Getting off of the ground was slow going. Ingrid’s shoulder screamed a deafening, blinding protest at the slightest jostling; the flesh didn’t tear, not exactly, but she could hear it squelching, a wet, sticky noise that made her stomach turn. As Dorothea got her to her feet, Ingrid started to wonder just how much blood she had lost. Her head was spinning, the cold piercing through her until it felt as if the cold was all she was, as if her heart had turned to a lump of ice. When she was finally upright, spots of black danced in Ingrid’s vision, and for one moment, the world went completely black again. Sweat dribbled down Ingrid’s face, a fulsome smell of sweat swimming in her nose.

All in all, maybe it would be better not to try to talk, at the moment.

Getting off of the ground had been slow going, but getting over to the dark row of windows on the far side of the square was nearly interminable. Ingrid’s head was clearing a little—it still spun, but minutely more slowly—but with the consequence of fatigue washing over her like a flood wave. The only thing that kept her form surrendering to sleep then and there was the throbbing pain in her shoulder, and a memory from childhood of a cousin shutting his eyes after an accident in the tiltyard and never opening them again.

Dorothea tried a door and clicked her tongue when it wouldn’t give.

The second door wouldn’t give, either, and the window frames around it bristled with broken glass hungry for more of their blood. “What,” she muttered, “did everyone just lock their doors before they fled for their lives?”

“Maybe…” Ingrid swallowed down on the gravel-roughness of her voice, though not before Dorothea’s eyes snapped to her face, those eyes entirely too bright in the late winter night. After taking a moment to steady herself, Ingrid tried again, “Maybe we should just try to go back to the monastery.”

“_No,” _Dorothea let out vehemently. “Not yet. I want a better look at you. I want to see how much more magic I need to put into the wound before we try to walk that sort of distance, and I do _not _want to try any of that out here, and argh…”

They’d hobbled over to a third door, and found it just as firmly shut as the first two—locked, or else the lock and the hinges had simply rusted shut in the years since the building was last occupied. Already, even as this place was starting to fill with people again, other parts of it were giving themselves over to desolation, the only way to make them fit again for human habitation to just rip the infected bits out.

Dorothea’s thoughts didn’t seem to be moving in quite so, erm, poetic a direction.

“Fuck this,” Dorothea snarled, voice breaking into a jagged, uneven cacophony so unlike its normal sweetness. She swung a fist against the door. “Fuck this. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Ingrid stared at her, mouth agape. “Dorothea…”

_“Ohh-hh…_” Dorothea peeled Ingrid off of her side and left her leaning against a wall, all with a gentleness utterly at odds with the fury crackling in her voice. “Don’t even start. I don’t care what that creep said. I am _no _lady. I never have been—“ she started at the door, yanking at the knob with both hands, before just swinging her fists and her feet at the door. The thumps were soft enough and the smell that arose from the wood sickly-sweet enough that the wood was clearly rotting. “—And I never—“ the wood groaned “—will be, not in _any _way the people that creep hated’ll accept. So don’t act so fucking surprised when—_argh_.”

The hinges let out a terrible shriek, a noise not unlike the noise Ingrid had always imagined when she read tales of Nemesis felling mountains with the Sword of the Creator. With a whoosh of stale air and a suddenly-erupting cloud of musty, choking dust, the door fell to the ground. Whether because there was a rug inside, the wood was just that soft, or the dust on the floor was just that thick, it didn’t make nearly as loud of a thud as it could have.

They took a few moments to cough.

Ingrid hated that the part of her mind that found Dorothea kicking a door down to be incredibly attractive hadn’t fallen out of her body with the blood.

“Come on,” Dorothea mumbled between coughs, pulling Ingrid’s weight onto her side again. “If it took that much just to get the door open, I can’t imagine anyone’s actually in there.”

In the dark, it was difficult to tell whether the ground floor of the building had been a shop or somebody’s home. Ingrid could just barely make out stairs at the edge of the room, but without more light, she would never have tested their strength. The air swirled with dust that had been kicked up by the felling of the door, a fusty mimic to the snow that still fell outside from time to time.

“Hang on, I think I see a chair.”

And sure enough, Ingrid found herself being deposited in a large chair that smelled faintly of mildew with stiff, almost unyielding cushions. The frame creaked a little when she gratefully settled her weight upon it—her head spun a little less when she was sitting—but it held. It was all Ingrid could do not to sink into the stiff cushions.

A hand jostled her good shoulder roughly. “I’ll be right back,” Dorothea muttered. “Don’t move, and don’t—“ even in the dark, it was impossible to miss a finger being waved in your face, when it was _that_ close “—fall asleep.”

“I won’t.”

Ingrid didn’t know if Dorothea nodded, or if she even acknowledged the words at all. She just left, the whispering rustle of her skirt and the shifting of shadow the only real signs of movement.

_That man said—_

Cold found her anew, settling icy claws beneath her skin. Even the wound felt cold.

_I just—_

(Ingrid prayed that she would not dream tonight. She did not wish to see what being rendered an empty vessel could make her, in the churning phantasm-world of her dreams. Her dreams were, well… Sometimes, Ingrid wished she had any talent at all with writing, so she could get the creativity out during the daylight hours.)

She wondered if Dorothea was going for her sword. _Perhaps it would be better just to leave it. _(The man had been utterly vile. Hacking him to pieces had not been the act of a knight.) It would, though, be more sensible not to simply leave the discarded weapons lying outside. A child could find them, and hurt themselves by accident. A criminal could find them, and sell them or use them for other purposes.

Light bobbed in the doorway. Ingrid tensed, until she recognized the outline that had appeared with it—Dorothea had returned, bearing the lantern the first man had lit what felt like hours ago.

Once Ingrid could see Dorothea in proper light, her eyes were riveted upon her, worried to the point of alarm. Dorothea’s hair, which had been neat and smooth and lustrous when they had left the monastery, was disheveled and grayed with dust. Her face was so waxen that Ingrid first feared that she had been injured, and the sight she beheld when her eyes drifted downwards only stoked that fear: the right side of Dorothea’s dress was awash with smears of blood.

But that had been the side Dorothea had leaned Ingrid’s weight against.

Dorothea held the lantern up so that the chair where Ingrid sat was properly illuminated. The lantern nearly slipped out of Dorothea’s hand as she made a wet, strangled noise in the back of her throat.

“What—“

“Don’t get up.” Dorothea made a swift path through the room, past overturned furniture, leaving a dark trail behind her where she had disturbed the many layers of dust. The lantern was discarded on a table with a harsh clang; a nimbus of silver light bloomed around her right hand almost before she even reached Ingrid. “Don’t get up, not right now, just let me heal it, just let me try to _close _it…”

Her hands were shaking. The right was surrounded by a nimbus of light that shivered when she shivered. The left was braced on Ingrid’s good shoulder, fingernails scrabbling uselessly at the thick wool of Ingrid’s surcoat.

For the first time since the fight started, Ingrid could see herself in proper light. So she looked down, and saw herself.

She… hadn’t thought there was quite that much blood.

“Don’t look at it, Ingrid.” Shadows beat at the shores of golden lantern light and silver magic light, carving deep lines into Dorothea’s face. Eyes a verdant green, lips a ruby red, and the rest of her face stark, bloodless white. “Don’t look at it. Just, just sit still while I work.”

Ingrid watched Dorothea’s shaking silver-washed hand. “Are you alright?”

Eyes flashing with bright anger, Dorothea sucked in a long, hissing breath. “Shut up.” Too hissing for tone, but the hint of a snarl was easily detected, nonetheless. “Don’t you _dare _ask about me when you’re—“ She shook her head, face screwed up, and pushed more magic into the wound.

And so passed any attempt of Ingrid’s to speak. No expert was she, but she thought that the second layer of _pale _starting to edge in on the borders of Dorothea’s bloodless face might have something to do with magical fatigue. Dorothea wouldn’t hear it, glowered at her when she tried to bring it up, and Ingrid still felt weak, still felt like she’d been training for hours and then forgotten to stretch properly afterwards, but she was feeling strong enough to grow agitated, to feel stifled by the angry cloud buzzing around Dorothea’s head, and oh, what she wouldn’t give to blow it all away…

At last, Dorothea seemed satisfied that she had done all she could for the wound, and drew her hand away, silver light winking out as quickly as a snuffed candle. Ingrid spared a glance down at the wound, heedless of Dorothea’s admonitions, and saw that, through the tear in her surcoat and the shirt beneath it, the wound wasn’t closed, not exactly. But it was smaller than it had been, and no blood poured from it, though the tear in her flesh still gleamed wetly.

“Ingrid.” Dorothea’s hitched voice had Ingrid looking up to her companion’s face. Voice jittering with something that could have been laughter, if it hadn’t been so shaky, “What the _hell_?”

Ingrid’s shoulders—she’d meant to draw her shoulders up, and if one of them hadn’t been injured, they probably would have wound up somewhere in the vicinity of her ears. Her right shoulder took that moment to remind her that partially healed did not mean fully healed and she hissed through clenched teeth as she slowly, _carefully _released the tension in her shoulders. She couldn’t quite keep the tension out of her voice as she replied, “What are you talking about?”

Dorothea sucked in a taut breath, a noise Ingrid had heard many times, when her father said something her mother thought especially foolhardy. “Don’t give me that.” She still sounded hitched and breathless, though. “You just charged straight at him, you didn’t even _try _to dodge when he swung his sword, you didn’t even _flinch _when he slashed you, what _was _that—“

Words died out of Dorothea’s tight-clamped mouth. Ingrid didn’t meet her eyes, didn’t look at her face. Watched her shoulders as they quivered more than the candle flame in the lantern, watched them shiver so strongly that they made the candlelight look still.

She didn’t have the tools required to flay herself open and speak of her own weakness, didn’t have the tongue to speak of her dreams, didn’t have the words to articulate her fears. A lady would have endured these things with her head held high. A knight would never have felt these fears at all. Either one of them would have been able to move past what arrested Ingrid and stopped her dead in her tracks. Neither one of them would have responded to the threat lobbed her way by…

(It had been too dark to make out any real detail regarding the lump.)

“I…”

_I… what? Butchered a man to death out of my own fear? Let fear and rage make me into a beast?_

(Had she sprouted claws or horns? Had her teeth grown? Had her eyes turned to caustic yellow? She felt as if it was all shifting just below the surface of her skin, searching restively for any break it could escape from.)

How could she ever speak to something like that?

“He posed a risk to us both,” Ingrid said stiffly, at last. True enough. “I feared he might deem you an easier target, and attack you first.” Perhaps he would have, if Ingrid had not charged him when she had, had Ingrid not—

(If she was to peel away her skin, she’d find coarse fur in place of blood and tissue. She knew it to be true, no matter what onlookers might say or think.

Maybe if she became a beast, no one would look at her and see a potential vessel for their own will. But Ingrid thought she feared the potential loss of humanity more than even that.)

Meanwhile, the tremble in Dorothea’s shoulders had abated not at all. “I can protect myself just fine.”

“I know that.”

“I’d have a harder time protecting myself if I was the only one in fighting shape _and _you were wounded.” And now, Ingrid wasn’t entirely certain if the wobbly words were spoken to her or if they were simply thoughts that had escaped Dorothea’s mind and aired themselves without her knowledge. “I mean, how well do you think _anyone _fights when someone they care about is wounded right in front of them, and…”

No words. Ragged breathing so loud that in the still, dusty gloom, the walls seemed to pulse with that breath and the throbbing heartbeat that must have accompanied it. Graceful, long-fingered hands clawed at a bloodied skirt, silver glittering like starlight on her left ring finger.

Ingrid watched those hands, watched them twist and fret and try to tear at silk too well-made to rip apart under that sort of effort. She imagined them bleeding and broken, imagined them cold and still, and swallowed on the bile that suddenly boiled up in her throat.

“When we entered this war,” Ingrid tried to say softly, but only managed quiet weakened by blood loss and fatigue. Even to her own ears, it sounded somewhat lame. “We accepted that death might find us. War breeds death like a swamp breeds flies, especially when it’s a war of conquest.” They actually hadn’t had too many of those in Fódlan—and there were few surviving records of Nemesis’s conquest, and those mostly discredited by the Church. But for all that the Church preached against undue contact with the corrupt outside world, some stories filtered in from the outer lands. Some of those were even war stories. “No one goes into battle seeking death—“ and Ingrid would overlook what Lord Gwendal had said in his dying moments; she had scarcely thought of it since those words passed by her ears, by design “—but there are some deaths that I don’t think anyone could complain about. There are…” Empty armor flashed in her mind, as if lit up by sunlight or fire. “There are good deaths.”

But Ingrid couldn’t imagine Glenn ever seeing red. He had always been so contained, so controlled when he trained, never wasting energy in his strikes, never giving in to his temper. Ingrid couldn’t imagine him rendering a lump of flesh from a corpse, couldn’t imagine him running at an enemy so heedlessly as to leave himself open to a slash from an enemy’s sword, not even in defense of Dimitri or of the late king.

(How had Dedue died? Dimitri had never given specifics, had shown no inclination to, and even if Ingrid hadn’t thought he would greet inquiries with hostility verging towards violence, Ingrid would not have pressed. The cloud that had descended upon him when he gave his terse explanation palpably reeked of blood and guilt—to speak of it would have seen that blood pour into Dimitri’s mouth and flood his lungs with coppery red. But Ingrid wondered about it, from time to time. At odd moments, she wondered how Dedue had died. This was one of them.)

Bitter laughter crackled in the chill air. Even this carried with it some ragged trace of beauty. “Is this more of your ‘true knight’ philosophy?”

Try as she might, Ingrid could not imagine the face of the man who had worn the armor that flashed and glittered in her mind. “Yes, it is.” Ingrid didn’t realize how tightly she had clenched her left hand until her arm began to tremble. “There’s honor in dying in the defense of your liege lord.”

Another spate of bitter laughter, laughter that still quivered in the background of her words as Dorothea spat, “Of course there is. Of _course _there’s honor in a ‘good death.’ Fuck, it’s all like an opera, isn’t it?” Her shoulders hunched, as the trembling spread from there to her whole body. “Except the blood isn’t paint. It’s—“ she began to pace up and down the dust-carpeted floor, gathering one of her hanging sleeves in her right hand. “It’s real blood, the wounds are real, you _really _could have died—“ her eyes snapped to Ingrid’s face, bright and swimming and _furious_ “—and what is supposed to be honorable about death?” she demanded. “You’re still worm food in the end, still one more body to be tossed in the ground; what the hell is honorable about death?!”

Ingrid reared back in her chair, barely cognizant of the lightning bolt of pain that shot out from her shoulder as her blood started to rush in her ears. “I’d sooner die with honor than live in disgrace. How could I ever show my face again if I ran away from battle?”

_You don’t run away from battle, _she could almost, not quite, find it in herself to challenge Dorothea with. _How can you deride ideals that you have always lived up to? How can you just spit on them like this when they’re the only thing separating us from the beasts?!_

“You can recover from ‘dishonor,’ though what _I’ve _noticed is that everyone who harps on about it’s never eager to explain exactly what dishonor _is_—“ Dorothea snorted “—probably so they can slap it on anyone they don’t like. Things like that ought to come from within; whenever someone else imposes it on you, there’s an angle.” She shook her head choppily. “I’ve never trusted it when some man in armor starts talking about dishonor; I think we could bounce back from anything _he _thinks is fatal.”

There were tales of what happened to—No. Ingrid shouldn’t call them ‘tales.’ ‘Tales’ implied that there might have been some element of fiction involved in the account of what could become of noble girls who had sex before marriage, and there was _not_. It was a matter of public record that the Margrave Gautier of a century ago had sold his no-longer-virginal adolescent daughter to a brothel after catching her in the arms of her lover. The records of his trial for human trafficking, for violating the laws that past archbishop had set against slavery, were readily available to anyone who gained access to the Royal Archives in Fhirdiad.

_“Once a whore, always a whore,_” he had famously said to the king of the day who sat in judgment of him. _“She shamed us. She dishonored us. A woman’s dishonor is a stain that can never come out, and it stains everything it touches. Once I gave her to the other whores, she was at least where she belonged. She was dead to us. She was dead to us, and we could finally wipe out the stains on our honor with her gone.”_

_“You must take her back,” _that king argued. _“Your daughter was not a horse to be sold away after it bit you. You must take her back. Only by taking her back can you save your own life.”_

And, just as famously, that Margrave Gautier had shrugged. _“Kill me, then. The honor of House Gautier will survive my death. But you would make my ancient home a whorehouse by forcing me to shelter a whore beneath my roof, and that, I will not do.”_

(The girl’s name had been Pearl. Ingrid had eventually discovered that when she found a record dated to shortly after that Margrave Gautier’s execution, when the king of the time, fed up with the widowed Lady Gautier’s refusal to accept her daughter back into her house, gave Pearl’s care to a church in southwestern Faerghus. After that, she vanished from the pages of history, and Sylvain had advised Ingrid to never ask his father about her. _“It’s a sore subject for him. He sure as hell didn’t take it well when _I _asked about her_.”)

This was different from that. But Ingrid knew that a woman did not recover from dishonor. She knew that. Whether she acted as a lady or as a knight, any dishonor she took upon herself would shadow her steps to the end of her days. A woman’s dishonor was a stain that would never come out, and any dishonor upon Ingrid was dishonor upon her family, a rotting, festering stain that could never be cut out, only spread until the rest of her house sat in ruins, and it would have been her fault.

So _no_, Ingrid could _not _just “recover” from dishonor. That was nearly the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard someone say in her life, and it was only nearly the most ridiculous because Ingrid had been around Sylvain and Dimitri both when they were given opium after they had broken bones in training accidents.

“Are you serious?! How could I ever go back to my parents and look them in the eye if—“

“And who are you going to ask to look them in the eye to tell them you’ve been killed?!”

The words rang out in the cold air, hard as the strike of hammer upon stone, shovel upon frozen earth.

They rang out, and had an interesting, very specific effect on the ability of Ingrid’s mouth to form speech.

Dorothea was trembling more violently than ever, and seemed to have taken Ingrid’s silence as license to go on. “You have told me…” And perhaps those words trembled too violently for Dorothea’s liking, for she trailed off, and took a few breaths, great, sucking gasps that didn’t seem to get nearly as much air into her lungs as they ought to have, for her voice, once she finally went on, still trembled, and now was faint as well. “You have told me much of knighthood.” Another breath, this one accompanied by eyes squeezed so tightly shut that Ingrid could believe that she was willing them to never open again. “And I’ve seen a lot more of it in battle, lately.

“It seems to me, that if you follow the code of knighthood,” Dorothea said, very deliberately, “it will lead you to one of two places, if the paths don’t _converge _first. You either end up a butcher like Lord Gwendal—“ she didn’t say _‘like you’_ and Ingrid could neither anticipate nor justify the sheer intensity of her relief “—or you wind up a corpse, like _you nearly did tonight_.”

Ingrid’s mouth unstuck, and the words came flowing out all at once. “It’s not like that all the—“

Dorothea made a noise like a sob in the back of her throat. It did wonders for silencing Ingrid anew. “I’ve never watched it end any other way.”

Desperation clutched stonily at Ingrid’s heart as she searched Dorothea’s face, but she saw no sign of give there, just the wet brightness of unshed tears, which managed somehow to sting most of all of it. “Didn’t you ever have dreams like that?” she asked, and with the low note thrumming under the words, it sounded more like a plea. “Did you ever have dreams like that as a child, of being like something out of the tales you read?”

Loudly, vehemently, “_No.” _Dorothea’s hands flew back to her bloodied skirt, wrenching at the fabric. “I had no books as a little girl, and dreams were just something that distracted you from finding enough food not to _starve_.”

Ingrid tried not to think about what that implied. (She’d be thinking about it a lot, later.) “After that?” she pressed, and there was no denying that pleading thrum now. “When you were in the opera, didn’t you have dreams, then?”

And Ingrid could only jump, startled, at the sudden burst of loud, nearly hysterical laughter that answered her.

Ingrid watched warily as Dorothea laughed and laughed and laughed, and then that wariness was washed away in favor of concern and squirming guilt as Dorothea’s unshed tears finally fell, cutting glittering tracks through the light coating of dust on her face. She struggled to still herself, master herself, enough to speak clearly, and the steadying breaths she took made her laughs sound more like sobs by the end. “Oh, sure.” An exhale that convulsed into a weak giggle. “And all it took was a completely preventable death here, and a jealousy-fueled mutilation there, to convince me that I ought to try dreaming of something _else_.”

More fuel for the phantasmagoria of dreaming. (Later, much later, Ingrid would have answers, _specifics_, and she would trade hazy phantasms for images that sliced through her dreaming mind like razors made of ice.)

“You don’t value your own life nearly as much as you should.”

It wasn’t a question. No question put to Ingrid had ever sounded so much like something that had been written down in her own blood.

Dorothea stared at her. She had stopped crying, but had made no move to wipe her face dry of tears, and the tracks glittered in the candlelight like she had scooped up a handful of stars from the sky and painted them onto her skin. Even like this, dusty and bloody and face dripping the salt of her own tears, she looked utterly unreal.

Dorothea sighed, and began to walk forward—though for the laborious jerkiness of her movements, it was more like she was propelling herself forward, possibly by force of will alone. Before Ingrid’s chair, she dropped to her knees, swift and fluid as if she was an actor in a play, a gray-white cloud of dust puffing up around her knees before settling back down on the floor. Dorothea reached out, grasped Ingrid’s hands in her own, and Ingrid—didn’t stop her. There were a few small calluses scattered around Dorothea’s fingers and palms, but otherwise, her skin was soft, and smooth. The softness of her palms made for a jarring juxtaposition with her bruised and bleeding knuckles.

(The ring was undamaged. Perhaps she’d put it in a pocket before she began to punch the door.)

“You don’t value your life nearly as much as you should,” Dorothea said again. “You really are like a character in an opera, Ingrid; a lot of the knights from those tales don’t value their own lives. And then they die, and the story’s over.” She sighed again. “But life isn’t a story, and after you die, you leave everything else behind. Every_one_ else. So why should your parents have to weep over your corpse? Why should _I_? Do you know what I—“

And for a moment, it was like all the air had vanished from the world. Ingrid stared intently down into Dorothea’s face, waiting, _willing _her to go on, to say something, finally _say _something.

Dorothea bowed her head, her shoulders sagging as if her bones had been replaced with jelly. Ingrid could feel her hands shaking.

“What would you do?” she asked lowly, and prayed the blood loss she had suffered tonight wouldn’t be enough to impair her memory.

“Weep, of course,” Dorothea said bitterly, and Ingrid pushed back her frustration only because she thought the strain of it might split her wound open again. “I don’t know what else you _expect_.”

And just like that, Dorothea withdrew, taking her hands from Ingrid’s and sweeping back up to her feet with an ease that would have made more sense if she had had strings for a puppeteer to yank on. “In short—“ she tried smiling, and stopped after it became apparent that the approximations were only going to get uglier the more she tried “—you don’t seem to understand just how valuable your life is, and I…” A quick breath. “…I want you to be more careful. That’s it.”

“That’s it,” Ingrid echoed, not quite a question.

“Hmm.”

She could scarcely bring herself to believe it.

“I…” Ingrid choked back a laugh, ran her hand through her hair. “…I don’t really _want _to die, you know.”

(She hadn’t known how nice it could be to have some answers, even if they weren’t all. _At least I know _why _now…_)

Dorothea smiled humorlessly. “Don’t ask me to take that on faith: prove it.” She reached down, starting to pull Ingrid out of the chair. “Now, come on. We should get back to the monastery. I really want Manuela to take a look at your wound, and soon.”

Ingrid grimaced. “And we need to make a report about the attack.”

“Which you can do from inside the infirmary,” came the firm response. “Now, let’s _go_.”

Outside, the world was now so heavily cloaked in darkness that Ingrid could not even see the lump of flesh she’d left behind her on those cracked and crumbling cobblestones. Dishonor not washed out, but concealed, for now. No, not washed out, could never _be _washed out, but she could at least promise herself that she would be more the master of herself in future battles, and that thought followed her all the way back into the lantern-lit embrace of the monastery:

_I do not wish to be a beast._


	5. Chapter Five

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [**CN/TW**: Blood, disturbing imagery, mentions of starvation, briefly touched-upon internalized homophobia]

Once they were back within the lantern-lit embrace of the monastery, for Ingrid, the night came to pass in a bit of a haze. Blood loss and exhaustion could can do that to you, Professor Manuela would tell her later, when she awoke the next day and found that she had slept for more than twelve hours uninterrupted. It was more surprising that she had been able to stay awake as long as she had.

Ingrid didn’t remember passing anyone by on the ground floor, though in retrospect, she supposed they must have done; even at night, even in dark days such as these, the monastery was not deserted. Her memories only became clear enough to make sense of when they mounted the staircase to the second floor over the reception hall.

And that set of corridors _had _been mostly deserted, but for Professor Manuela, alone in the infirmary, and Alois, who was apparently in charge of the guards that night and thus the one taking reports. Honestly, it wasn’t a combination Ingrid would have asked for, but it wound up working out fairly well.

Alois was… Ingrid had never interacted with him too much, not when she was a student, and not afterwards. The man had tutored students in brawling, axe-wielding, and how to fight in and properly maintain heavier suits of armor. None of those things had ever been areas Ingrid spent time training in. She preferred a lance, a sword, and even a bow to an axe as the weapon she took out into the field. While it wasn’t impossible to fight with gauntlets from the back of a pegasus, it was generally considered extremely inadvisable—it would be so easy to lose your balance and fall, fall, fall. On top of that, the vast majority of pegasi weren’t strong enough to bear a heavily-armored rider, and so it was best to stick to lighter sets.

Ingrid had never had much interaction with Alois, nor much reason _to _interact with him. He had always come off as an easygoing, slightly silly man, though Ingrid had watched him fight often enough to know that that silliness did _not _carry over to the battlefield. He spoke of his family often, he made bad puns more, and he laughed the most. He was an easily likeable man, but not a man easy to take seriously. Ingrid had never seen much from him, off the battlefield, to challenge her assumption that he was, indeed, a slightly silly man.

She could see no trace of that silliness in Alois now, as he took their report. “I had thought we had rooted them all out,” he said grimly, “but it sounds like we missed a few. I am sorry you two ran into trouble.”

“One of the men mentioned having a contact, probably outside of the monastery,” Dorothea mentioned, as Ingrid sat still under Professor Manuela’s attentions (There was apparently little to be done beyond purifying the wound and bandaging it; Professor Manuela didn’t think it deep enough anymore to require stitches). “His name was…”

“Kajus,” Ingrid supplied wearily. (She wished so badly to sleep, and dream not at all.) “His name is Kajus.”

“Not a name I’m familiar with.” Alois looked to Professor Manuela. “Does the name ring a bell with you, Manuela?”

Professor Manuela’s hands, glowing with bright white purifying magic, still a moment over Ingrid’s shoulder. “No.” She made a sharp clicking noise with her tongue. “I’ve known a lot of lowlifes, but I don’t recognize that one.”

A short, sharp nod from Alois. The infirmary was considerably better lit than the building where Dorothea had plied magic to Ingrid’s wound, where they had—Ingrid was too tired to think about that right now. The infirmary was well-lit, but night would not be denied in full, and night’s shadows carved deep the already deep lines in his face. “Alright. I’ll track down Seteth and talk to him. I hate to put the town under curfew, but until we’ve caught our latest rats, we may have no choice. Good night, ladies.”

And then he was gone, and Ingrid had even less reason to stay awake than before.

Her hearing unraveled; sounds drifted to her only distantly, and then, she could make no essay at comprehension that would not end in comprehensive failure. Dorothea and Professor Manuela were talking about something, in low tones that flowed and ebbed as the current of one of the brooks in the dense forests beyond the monastery grounds. Other noises, a thud, a rustle, a long, drawn-out scratch of something heavy against something flat.

Then, someone was helping Ingrid out of her shirt so that she could be bandaged properly, and she was too tired to protest or even be embarrassed. She shivered in the clammy air, but soon enough, someone was pushing her down onto the bed, and her vision winked out, and she just slept and slept and slept.

-0-0-0-

In her dreams, Ingrid runs on all fours in the dark. Blood is in her nose and blood is in her mouth. Her claws rend all in her path, all that she hates, all that she is indifferent to, all that she loves. A beast, after all, has not the mind to discriminate between what it seeks to destroy and what it wishes to preserve.

She tries to climb into an empty suit of armor that she finds lying out in the dark, for this could turn her back into a human woman—it is the only thing that could turn her back into a human woman, she fears. But her claws tear through it like tearing through paper, the steel screaming as she mutilates it into something utterly beyond recognition. The mangled metal weeps blood while the beast watches. This is not something she can hold on to.

-0-0-0-

Confinement to the infirmary might, Ingrid thought, be worse than her dreams, or even the wound that had put her in here in the first place. Professor Manuela insisted on Ingrid staying in the infirmary for observation until at least the following morning after the one she had woken up to. She would not be persuaded, wheedled around, or gainsaid. _She _was the head of the infirmary, and the head of the infirmary was saying that Ingrid Brandl Galatea needed to stay here for observation for another twenty-four hours. At least. _More _if she managed to strain herself and open the wound back up, and we wouldn’t want _that_, now would we?

It had ultimately been that last shot that had made Ingrid concede, though not for the reasons Professor Manuela seemed to have inferred. The longer it took for Ingrid’s wound to heal, the longer it would take for her to be in fighting form again. The longer _that _took, the less useful she would be in this war. A speedy recovery was, then, a necessity.

She just wished it hadn’t rendered her something like housebound _again_.

All she could do was read the books Professor Manuela had gotten from the library for her. And Ingrid certainly _liked _reading, and an advantage of being within easy walking distance of one of the most extensive libraries in Fódlan was that you were unlikely ever to run out of reading material, but Ingrid was not someone who had been designed with ‘staying inside all day’ in mind. She had discovered this, to her great vexation, during all the years she spent hiding in the Fraldarius household, and this time, there wasn’t even the excuse of her family’s safety hanging by a thread to keep her away from the windows, away from the outdoors.

(Her father’s deception must certainly have been uncovered by now. Those men fighting under Lord Gwendal who had fled the field at Ailell would have reported back to Count Rowe, who would have reported to Cornelia. Cornelia knew that her father had lied. And House Galatea’s position was no less difficult now than it had been some five years past—they still relied primarily on food grown in what was firmly occupied territory. How would they fare now?

_I didn’t want to be the tool by which my house was destroyed._)

Of course, something Ingrid got in this infirmary that she had not gotten in the last place she had been confined to was a steady stream of visitors.

“I am _so _sorry,” Sylvan nearly stammered when he locked eyes with Ingrid from the doorway, and for once, Ingrid didn’t have to ask herself if he really meant it: his face was a nasty shade of white and he had been audibly out of breath when he first appeared in the doorway, as if he had run a great distance to get here.

Ingrid sighed heavily. “I don’t think things would have been too different if you had been there.”

They had been arrogant, those men, and maybe their arrogance had stemmed at least in part from the fact that both of their intended victims were women, but maybe they would have closed in even had a tall man been walking with them. Maybe they would have looked at a group of three and thought they had a great windfall on their hands, if only they could separate the unwary from their purses.

(_That one said—He said Kajus didn’t want boys_. And before Ingrid could stop herself, her mind was conjuring visions—Sylvain dead, and herself and Dorothea… But that was something best consigned to nightmares. At any point of the day when she had any level of control over her thoughts, she would not go seeking this vision out.)

Sylvain gave a jittery laugh as he took a few steps into the room—though he stopped far short of Ingrid’s bedside. “Yeah, tell that to Dorothea. She nearly took a swing at me while I was heading over here. That’s probably the angriest any woman’s been with me in a while.”

Ingrid resisted the urge to ask how Dorothea had seemed, apart from angry enough to get into a fistfight with a man with several inches and several pounds of muscle on her. She wasn’t sure how Sylvain would take that… Actually, she knew exactly how Sylvain would take that, and she wasn’t prepared to deal with it, right now.

If she was feeling good enough to try to start a fight with Sylvain, she was probably alright. Probably. Ingrid wouldn’t dwell on why she hadn’t come back around here since last night. Dorothea had her duties. She likely hadn’t had time. Ingrid wouldn’t ask her to shirk her daily tasks just to come up here. They’d cross paths again once Ingrid was discharged. Surely, they would. (Ingrid couldn’t decide whether she was looking forward to the meeting with giddy anticipation or dread. The unsettled, churning feeling in the pit of her stomach wasn’t especially articulate.)

“So, does this mean you’re going to stop trying to shove us into each other’s arms?” Ingrid settled for asking. Professor Manuela had stepped out, and while the question wasn’t particularly safe in her presence or out of it, it felt a little safer when it was just her and Sylvain in the infirmary. Dorothea _had _told her once that she and Professor Manuela had worked together in Mittelfrank, that Professor Manuela had been a mentor to Dorothea there. Ingrid… was glad that Professor Manuela was not here now to hear her and Sylvain having this conversation.

Another laugh, considerably less jittery than the first. “Nope,” and Sylvain almost succeeded in sounding blithe.

Ingrid shut her book with a satisfyingly loud thud and pressed a hand to her forehead. “Of course not. Of _course _you’re not. I don’t know why I expected anything else.”

“Hey, my consistency is part of my charm,” Sylvain told her, as he finally started moving again and sat down on the edge of the bed next to Ingrid’s.

“And if you ever figure out where your charm ran off to, let me know so I can yell at it for being so sleazy,” Ingrid muttered. She froze, frowning. “Actually, no.” She gritted her teeth. “Actually, let’s _never _talk about your charm, ever again. I have enough battle scars from listening to you and Dorothea lock horns about ‘charm’ already.”

“But that was fun.”

“For _you_, maybe; definitely not for me.”

Sylvain threw up his hands, rolling his eyes and trying (and failing) to stifle a lopsided smile. “Okay, then. No more talking about charm, even though I have an abundance of it, eheh, and I’m going to stop talking about it right now,” he added quickly, when Ingrid hefted her book menacingly, “so please don’t throw that.”

Ingrid set the book down, but close to her hand. Just in case.

Sylvain eyed the book for a moment longer, and Ingrid could just imagine him trying to guess at the book’s weight, how accurately and how hard Ingrid could throw it. He probably had the numbers figured out in his head; if he would just apply himself properly, there’d be no more of so many of the people around here taking him for an idiot…

But that wasn’t an argument Ingrid had the energy for, not today.

And Sylvain didn’t seem eager to go there, either. “Sooo… Has it been just you up here so far?”

“No. Felix stopped by about an hour ago, and Mercedes and Annette visited this morning.”

Mercedes and Annette had come first, bearing food they had either wheedled away from the cooks or outright pilfered from the breakfast table in the dining hall. Ingrid was hardly going to complain about how they came by it; her portion was no greater than it would have been if she had actually been down in the dining hall for breakfast, and while literally everyone who had ever had Professor Manuela’s cooking raved about how good it was, it was hard to cook when you weren’t allowed any food to cook with.

(It had been hard to will herself to take the first bite, no matter how her stomach growled. Ingrid looked at the biscuits she had been provided, and all she could think about was the aroma of cooking meat, something that was not pork but smelled _so _much like it. For a moment, Ingrid wanted to never feel hunger again, never _eat _anything again, but that moment passed quickly in the face of her hunger, and she was eating eagerly.

“When we have paprika again,” Professor Manuela muttered, eyeing Ingrid’s biscuits with the air of being distinctly unimpressed by them, “I am going to cook so much cachopo they’ll have to dig out a new cellar just to store it all. I’m sick of all of this plain food.”

“Oh!” Mercedes pressed her hands together, palm-to-palm, her eyes lighting up. “I love cachopo. I used to make it with my mother all the time when we were living together in the Kingdom. If you can set up a date, I’ll be glad to help you.” She tilted her head, ever so slightly. “I don’t remember my mother ever using paprika as an ingredient, though.”

Manuela laughed slightly. “I do when I make it. Gives it a little extra kick, which—” she laughed again, more ruefully “—some mornings, I do need.”

“What is cachopo?” Ingrid asked, curious, while Annette nodded in agreeing curiosity.

By the time they were done describing it, Ingrid wished they had paprika right now. Along with veal. And mushrooms. She was never going to turn her nose up at the food presented to her, not unless it was spoiled or rotting or she suspected—or _knew_—that it had been poisoned, but after a few months, she was heartily sick of plain food and meager portions.)

Mercedes and Annette promised to bring Ingrid more food come suppertime. Ingrid could only hope that there would be at that time no discussions of the food they could be having for supper if they had a better, wider array of ingredients. Her imagination was already running while every time she took a bite.

Felix had appeared in the doorway a short while after Mercedes and Annette had taken Ingrid’s plate back downstairs. There was a long, thin object wrapped in cloth slung over his shoulders, and his face as he regarded her was pale and set, amber-brown eyes fixed firmly on the swath of bandages visible out from under the collar of Ingrid’s infirmary smock.

(“I found this down in the town,” Felix said simply, holding the long bundle out to Ingrid without ever quite meeting her gaze.

Ingrid could feel its shape without needing to unwrap it; she stared down at what now laid in her lap, and the weight in her stomach was as if she had swallowed a millstone. “My sword.”

He nodded minutely. “It’d be a waste of good steel to leave it out to rust.”

Of course. He was practical that way, and Ingrid supposed she should have expected this. And… she knew she ought to appreciate the gesture. It kept her sword out of the hands of a child who could have hurt themselves with it, kept it out of the hands of a criminal who could have done harm to others with it. And what she had done with it was a fault with herself, not with the sword. She ought not feel unease at having it back in her possession. She ought not. The sword was just a tool.

Ingrid forced herself to nod in turn. “I thank you,” and if her voice was stiff, then after everything that had happened, that was only natural.

Felix regarded her in another long, drawn-out silence. The taut line of his jaw was familiar to her. The shifting, uneasy gleam in his eyes was familiar, too.

“I want another bout with you.” This, too, was familiar. “Swords only, no lances or bows.”

Ingrid scrubbed her forehead. “You’re getting ahead of yourself, aren’t you? Professor Manuela says it’ll be about a week before the wound’s fully healed. I’m not allowed to be doing any fighting—or sparring—before then.”

“I’m just being careful,” Felix nearly snapped. “You’ve gotten sloppy enough that you got hit by something you should never have let through. Next time, it’s likely to be your neck.”

Ingrid could easily have bristled. But… she knew him, did she not? “Alright.”)

Back in the present, Ingrid shot something that could have been a smile Sylvain’s way. “So, what have you come up here to talk about? Have you angered another poor girl already?”

“What?” Sylvain’s shoulders shot up. “_No_. I just wanted to make sure you were alright. I was on guard duty at the far end of the monastery all night; I didn’t find out about this until about twenty minutes ago.”

“I know, Sylvain. I’m just trying to tease you.”

He snorted. _“That’s _weird. You must have lost a lot of blood last night, huh?”

“That’s…” There was no use denying what he had hit on so readily. “Yes, I did.”

She had blacked out momentarily a few times during the walk back to the monastery. Truly, it had been momentary; Dorothea hadn’t even noticed it, the moments were so fleeting. No one knew it, and it was something that would likely stay locked behind Ingrid’s teeth for the rest of her life. Her weakness was… It was her own, and it was private.

And she felt better, now. Professor Manuela had given her a strong-smelling, bitter-tasting tonic this morning with breakfast, and most of her strength had returned to her. Which made being bound to this room all the more frustrating, but at least she didn’t feel as if she might faint. That weakness was gone, now, so there was even less reason to confide her weakness in others.

Even without any additional confidence, Sylvain’s brow furrowed, his mouth twisting in a crooked, downward-pointing line. “But you’re feeling better now, aren’t you?”

“Yes. Professor Manuela plans to discharge me tomorrow morning. She’s only keeping me here because—“ and here, Ingrid could do nothing but let her frustration bleed through “—I can’t be trusted not to strain myself and reopen the wound. Apparently.”

Sylvain sent a smirk Ingrid’s way. “Wow, I guess Manuela’s judgment is better than I thought.”

“Somehow, I _really _doubt she gave you permission to call her by just her name, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t make cracks about my work ethic. _Especially _considering how hard it is to make you do your chores.”

At the mention of ‘chores,’ Sylvain was hopping up from the bed, a bright, cheery, utterly false smile plastered to his face. “Annnd if you’re feeling good enough to lecture me about _chores_, I obviously had nothing to worry about. I’ll be seeing you, Ingrid.”

Ingrid stared at his retreating back, torn between confusion and a bitter, familiar disappointment. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

And then, he was gone, and Ingrid could only stare in disquiet at the space he had once occupied. Only rumpled bedsheets provided any evidence that Sylvain had been here at all.

What was it about that man that made him so—

Whatever. It wasn’t something Ingrid could fix. Even if Sylvain would tell her why, she didn’t think she could have fixed it. Some things weren’t anyone’s to fix.

(_You weren’t always like this._)

Ingrid set her book back on her lap, and picked back up where she had left off.

-0-0-0-

Eventually, even if it felt like an eternity had passed, the hands on the clock must turn enough for the next day to arrive, in a burst of bright late winter sunlight that lit up the stained glass windows of the infirmary and sent fairy shadows dancing across the floor and the beds. It was a pretty sight, certainly, and pretty sights were rare enough these days to be treasured, but the moment Professor Manuela declared Ingrid fit to leave the infirmary, she was out the door. Mercedes had brought her a fresh change of clothes earlier that morning, but Ingrid would have been out of there even if she’d had to go out in her infirmary smock, with a blanket around her shoulders like a cloak. She wanted too badly to feel sunlight on her face again.

Not that there was much that Ingrid was allowed to do for the next several days. Fighting and heavy lifting of any kind, but especially the sort which required her to lift her arms over her head, were expressly forbidden. Professor Manuela had made certain that anyone who might have been in a position to give Ingrid something to _do _knew that, and thus, Ingrid was at loose ends, barred from training or doing anything that might have made her useful.

At least she could go outside again.

At least the weather had decided to play nice.

It was milder today than it had been in weeks—the wind that blustered across the broken shell of the monastery carried a cold bite to it still, but it reminded Ingrid of spring at home, and thus, she couldn’t hold the bite against it. Fluffy white clouds raced across a dazzling blue sky; the bare branches of the deciduous trees growing on the grounds quivered under the same force that made those clouds move so swiftly. The grass visible beneath the patchy snow was brown and dead, but the patches of snow glimmered and flashed in the sun.

The paths had been cleared of rubble long ago, and if not for the structural damage still clearly visible everywhere Ingrid looked, she could have believed that she was back in school again. She could have believed that she and the few people she had encountered as she walked around outside were all just late for a church service in the cathedral, or something like that.

One day, things would be better. One day, this place would be whole again. It was easier to believe that in the bright light of day. It was easier to believe that now, however difficult it might be to accomplish.

_Mother would weep, if she could see the monastery as it is now. I don’t want that._

Ingrid did not wish for her mother to weep, for any reason.

Noises rose up from the green (so to speak; it certainly wasn’t green right _now_) outside of the Academy classrooms. Children’s voices rising up in shouts and screams. Ingrid tensed for a moment, making her shoulder throb and ache dully, but she could discern no fear in those shouts or those screams, and she relaxed.

Tension gone, curiosity rose up to take its place. There were children around here, for all that the presence of children was not something Ingrid would have ever expected from the monastery in this day and age. Ingrid hadn’t had much to do with these children—her chores didn’t relate to their care, and she was, as an adult, somewhat awkward around young children (She couldn’t shake the impression of her grandmother muttering about how Ingrid ought to have had a couple of her own by now). She didn’t think she’d ever seen, or heard, rather, them gather in such a large group as what would be necessary to produce the number of shrieks that she could still hear being tossed up to the air.

Well, satisfying her curiosity would give her something to do. Ingrid rounded the corner that took her past the training grounds and one of the many railings overlooking a sheer, dizzy drop down to the bottom of the gorge that cut such a crooked line through the grounds of the monastery. The wind caught in her loose hair (she had cut it while she was traveling south towards Garreg Mach with Felix and Sylvain, for utility rather than any aesthetic reason, and there was so much less hair now and it felt so _strange _to be reminded), blowing it over her face as she turned the corner and the green came into view. When Ingrid got a good look at what was going on over there, she paused, a lopsided, almost bemused smile playing on her lips.

Children needed time to play to be truly happy. Ingrid might not have much to do with small children as an adult woman, but she knew that much; it was hardly a mystery to her. She hadn’t always had much time to play as a child, but what playtime she’d had, she’d cherished. She had to say, though, that while a dearth of peers, both age-wise and rank-wise, had driven her to play with partners she otherwise wouldn’t have considered (and she didn’t think that Séverin or Glenn would have considered her or Felix playmates back when they were all very young if they’d had more children to play with who were closer to their age), she hadn’t thought that a large group of children, with a large range from youngest to oldest, would have chosen to play together in a group.

But then, Ingrid really didn’t spend much time around children.

Later, Ingrid would wonder where they had gotten the ball. In the crumbling ruin that was the monastery, the only thing more out of place than the ball was the two posts set up at the opposite ends of the by-now very muddy green. Out of place it was, and yet, there was a group of about twenty children of varying ages (the oldest looked maybe fourteen, while the youngest could have been around six) split up into two teams, locked in a “vicious battle” over which post the ball was going to be kicked towards.

Very basic, this, but now that Ingrid was closer, she could hear the laughter layered in with the shouts and the screams, and she could see the smiles on their faces.

She watched them, a strange, bubbly, not entirely unpleasant feeling coiling in her stomach.

Then, a flash of silver caught Ingrid’s eye, and the fluttering sensation in her stomach was considerably more disquieting, and considerably more familiar.

Dorothea waved her over to the bench in the sun where she was sitting, smiling so brightly that for a moment her smile seemed to eclipse the sun altogether. _Will it always be like this? Will everything pale next to her, always?_

Wondering all the while if her smile made her look queasy, Ingrid picked her way around the edge of the green, dodging a flying ball on one occasion and jumping out of the way of a young girl on another. By the time she reached the bench, her boots were caked with mud and she was wondering if the color of the bile that might escape her stomach would match the hue of the mud or just paint the ground in another, equally unpleasant shade.

Meanwhile, Dorothea didn’t seem to feel any disquiet at all, or (maybe more likely) she was just better at hiding it. Even the rosy patches at the tops of her cheeks and on the tip of her nose looked like they were due entirely to the wind blustering around them. “How are you feeling?” she asked in a low voice as Ingrid sat down on her right hand side. “Is there still any pain?”

“Not much,” Ingrid replied, just as lowly (She might be inexperienced with children, but she could at least guess at the things that might spook them). “It throbs a bit when I tense up or I move my arm too quickly, but that’s to be expected.”

But Dorothea’s brow knit. “Will you let me give it another look?”

“What?” Ingrid felt as if she was back in Ailell again, for all the fire heating her face. “Out here? I mean, it’s quite… quite cold, and…”

At the same time, the flush in Dorothea’s cheeks darkened a little, spread a little. “Oh, I’m sure Manuela did an excellent job.” She laughed, utterly failing to make it sound light. “I know it’s probably nothing, but I can’t help but…”

They petered out at around the same time, eyeing each other in what to Ingrid felt like a fraught, almost desperate silence. Though the children playing with their ball were still screaming and shouting and shrieking with laughter, the noise all felt oddly distant. Ingrid thought that, beneath the rosy flush, Dorothea’s face looked a touch wan.

Finally, Ingrid cleared her throat. (She could only hope she would not croak.) “What was it you wished to do?”

“I…” Another faint laugh, slightly choked, maybe forced. “…I don’t need you to take off your shirt. Just hold still for a moment.”

Dorothea’s hand glowed the same pulsing white that Professor Manuela’s had when she purified the wound two nights ago. As she leaned past Ingrid to set her hand on the bandaged, healing slash wound, Ingrid’s nose was flooded with the scent of her perfume. Today’s was different from the bright, floral perfume Ingrid had smelled wafting from Dorothea’s skin before. This was still sweet, but heavier, more pungent, and it made Ingrid’s head spin so rapidly that all she could focus on was the way the sunlight lit up Dorothea’s lustrous hair.

After what felt like either a split-second or an eternity, Dorothea pulled away, the glow around her hand winking out. “It feels like it’s healing as it should,” Dorothea murmured, nodding to herself. “There’s no sign of infection.”

“Professor Manuela wants me to report back to the infirmary twice a day so she can ensure there’s no infection,” Ingrid assured her. “I promise you, there is no cause for worry.”

Adjusting her shawl so that it might cover more of her shoulders, Dorothea leaned back and sighed. “You’ll forgive me if I worry anyways? I have spent a _lot _of time living in conditions that lend themselves to infection. I just want to be sure.”

“I… That’s fine, Dorothea. Thank you for your concern.”

“Hmm.” Dorothea pursed her lips. Then, she flashed a smile, all thinned lips and white teeth. “I got roped into acting as the referee for today’s game.” Though the warmth that ignited in her voice signaled that perhaps ‘roped into’ wasn’t the most accurate term to describe the nature of her involvement. “Really, all I’m doing is making sure nobody gets hurt, but I do need to pay attention to them in the meantime.” Her eyes flitted over Ingrid’s face. “Will you stay?”

Ingrid nodded silently.

And for the next several minutes, they sat and watched the game. Some of these children, Ingrid thought, especially a couple of the older girls, might make for decent infantry soldiers once they were a bit older. They were strong and fast and well-coordinated; Ingrid could see the skills they displayed in the game translating well to swordsmanship or battle gauntlets.

But that depended a lot on the will of the potential soldiers in question. You could conscript someone to make them fight for you, but conscriptions should never be used but as a last resort. (The lessons had been taught to Ingrid as much as to Séverin. It wasn’t always clear which one of them would inherit the headship of House Galatea—obviously, a Crest was preferred, and Father was the head of their house primarily because _no one _in the previous generation had possessed one, but the Crest of Daphnel staying in House Galatea was not as vital to the survival of House Galatea as the Crest of Gautier remaining with its ancestral house was to that same ancestral house, and Ingrid’s real value in the eyes of dynastic politics laid… elsewhere—but their father had thought the lessons would benefit them both.) People generally became soldiers if they possessed the will to fight, and a will to be athletic was hardly the same thing. They’d all just have to wait and see, wouldn’t they?

Also, it probably wouldn’t hurt to wait until the children were better-nourished. Some of it could be due to growth spurts and growing pains, but Ingrid though a few of them were looking scrawny.

_We’re all looking a bit scrawny these days, though, aren’t we?_

There was little that Ingrid could do about _that_. After about thirty seconds, she settled in, tried not to smell the perfume wafting over to her, and watched the game.

Ingrid wasn’t certain how long the game went on. The children showed no signs of tiring—she could remember being like that, a child with boundless energy (until it all fled her at once without warning, and she had occasionally needed to be carried back into the house), and it was entirely possible that they could have kept going until sundown. Maybe not if they got hungry, but the break would probably have lasted just as long as they needed to eat lunch, and the extra energy provided by the food could potentially have kept the game going long after dark.

But the church bells began to sing out the hour, and Dorothea sprang to her feet and clapped her hands together. “Okay!” she called, her voice ringing out in the courtyard as if she had yelled—but that was likely one of the advantages of being a professional singer, knowing how to project your voice without properly raising it. “That’s the bell! You all know what that means!”

_Ingrid _didn’t, but just going by the chorus of groans that sounded in response, she could make an educated guess.

Dorothea smiled at the group with ready sympathy, but a firm look in her eyes that allowed for no misapprehension of her motives. “That’s right. It’s time for all of you to wash up and go to class. Class is in the dining hall today, in half an hour.” Sing-song, she added, “And if anyone tries to skip, they’ll just get more class later. So don’t be late—I will find out.”

Slowly but surely, they filtered off of the green. Ingrid was surprised there wasn’t more in the way of protest—she could also remember being a child who, while she was mostly obedient to her parents’ wishes, dislike having her playtime cut short—and she supposed there was probably a story in that. Maybe she’d hear it, one day. As Dorothea turned back to her, the idea of asking her seemed as insurmountable as crossing Fódlan’s Throat on foot during the Pegasus Moon.

_Am I to be left behind to weep for you?_

Was that what she had said, exactly? Oh, that didn’t matter. The words rang out in Ingrid’s mind, over and over like the tolling of the bell at noontime, as Dorothea sat back down on the bench beside her, flicking a bit of imaginary dirt from her skirt as she did so. She’d said something very much like it, if she hadn’t said that exactly, and the idea of it made Ingrid’s stomach and her heart squirm and her mouth run dry of words that would be both intelligible and not utterly ruinous to her dignity and her honor.

There were things she wanted to say in response to that, but it wasn’t for a woman to—

No.

Ingrid thought she was past that point. She understood a little better now, or thought she did, and even if her heart still wanted what it could not have, she could at least lay aside that one point. Rarely expressed and always present, it wasn’t even useful in the way that it hurt her. She was sick of it. She was done with it.

Then, Ingrid’s eyes lit on Dorothea’s hands. She looked at those hands, looked past the ring and the memory of white and silver glow and noticed for the first time the mottled stripe of bruises running across the knuckles on both hands, painted blue and green and yellow with an undertone of purple. Something like that on a canvas would have been pretty, but on flesh the sight of it spurred Ingrid to ask, “How are your hands? Why haven’t you…” And stop, once she had strayed into something that, absurdly, felt completely invasive.

“Oh, they’re just bruises.” Dorothea stretched out her fingers as if admiring paintwork instead of examining the marks left on her skin after she knocked a door down. “I don’t have any broken bones, nor any numbness. They’ll heal on their own in a week or so, so I didn’t see any need to use magic on them.”

To that, all Ingrid could do was blink.

Dorothea raised an eyebrow. “Does that surprise you?”

Ingrid tried to imagine a time when Dorothea didn’t at least set out to look as immaculately groomed as possible, and couldn’t. Any time she wound up mussed, it was in the course of doing something in a location where she didn’t have access to makeup, a hairbrush, or a bathtub. Ingrid thought this was the first time she had seen Dorothea sporting an appearance that was anything short of curated to an inch of her life when she might have had a choice to appear otherwise.

“I… would have thought you wouldn’t wish to deal with the soreness of bruised hands.”

Dorothea shrugged, not quite dismissively. “I’ve had plenty of bruises in my time; we all have. I don’t want to waste my energy getting rid of them when I know they’ll be gone after a bit on their own.”

“Practical,” was all Ingrid could think to say, as she determinedly looked anywhere that wasn’t at Dorothea’s hands.

They sat there in silence, the wind’s howls forming something that Ingrid thought sounded like laughter, though personally she felt she was by now predisposed to regard it as such. Try as she might to avoid it, Ingrid was constantly aware of Dorothea’s perfume. What scent _was _that? She was no great expert on perfumery; for much of her life, she had been utterly uninterested in anything that did not pertain to battle or knighthood in some way or another. Perfume was not something a knight would ever wear into battle, and thus, Ingrid had never paid it any mind. (Plus, the one time she had tried on perfume, at her mother’s not-quite-demand, her neck had broken out in a rash that had unnerved both of her parents badly enough that they had never tried to encourage her towards it again.) Ingrid could not begin to guess what that scent was.

“Ingrid. I want to apologize.”

“For what?”

Dorothea smoothed down her skirt with both hands, a long, slow gesture that did nothing to eradicate the long creases in the dark fabric. “I…” A soft, breaking sound like a laugh escaped her mouth. “…I am not in the habit of using inappropriate language, and…” She smiled crookedly, and definitely to herself, for she wasn’t even looking into Ingrid’s face as she smiled. “…Certainly not in that quantity. Or volume. I may not be a lady, but I know we have a reputation here that we’re supposed to at least _try _to maintain.”

She was more of a lady than the woman styling herself Duchess of the Faerghus Dukedom would ever hope to be. In certain—no, many—respects, she was more of a lady than Ingrid would ever be. Ingrid couldn’t quite find the words to say so.

“You need not apologize to me,” Ingrid said instead. That… felt overly formal, and she tried for something that she hoped wouldn’t sound quite as stiff. “I…” She tried to smile. “I don’t think profanity where no one else can hear it is going to have a serious impact on our reputation.”

Her mother would have been nodding along with Dorothea, though. That was an odd image, Lady Edith and Dorothea agreeing about something. Ingrid’s mother was… Well, she would probably agree with Dorothea that Dorothea was _not _what you would call a lady, though Ingrid _hoped _her mother would base that judgment on behavior, rather than on background. (It still didn’t sit well, still wasn’t kind. Ingrid could only hope for the less unkind of the options available.) Lady Edith’s ideas of what made a proper lady excluded Ingrid pretty thoroughly from the ranks. Dorothea likely wouldn’t make the cut, either.

That wasn’t what this was about, though.

Dorothea shifted her weight in her seat, tapped a finger against her cheek. “It’s certainly going to make the people around here think we have more in common with the thieves holding court a few months back than with the _Church of Seiros_.”

“You think they wouldn’t trust us? Over _swearing_?”

Maybe Ingrid had misjudged just how seriously Dorothea took all of this.

“Don’t underestimate the power of reputation,” Dorothea retorted, waving a finger in Ingrid’s face. Her mouth was quirked in an ambivalent expression, somewhere between a teasing smile and a pensive frown. “Once we’ve lost it, we’ll never get it back in full, and we’ll bleed public support all the while. The same people giving us food from their own winter larders would turn their backs in an instant if they thought we were like the bandits who raided their villages.”

And Ingrid did not need Dorothea or anyone else lecturing her on the power of reputation. She was a noblewoman from the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus; she _knew_. Knights lived and died by their reputations; the dishonored could very easily and very quickly find themselves masterless, homeless, lifeless. And yet…

Ingrid drew a deep breath. The cold air sliced her lungs, making her chest burn, but she did not mind it. She felt almost as though she needed the pain to spur on the words. “I would still do my best to protect them,” she said quietly. “This place has been without its protectors for far too long, and the people have suffered for it. I understand why they might resent us—the knights who should have protected them fled instead to search for Lady Rhea, and bandits moved in to fill the vacuum.”

How many incidents of raiding had there been in Galatea territory in the first year after King Lambert’s death? Her parents had tried to keep it from her, but Ingrid had still heard the whispers, still seen the resentment darkening the eyes of the peasants living in Galatea territory when she went out into the land with her parents. A lord or ruling lady was to protect their people, and the Galateas had failed, then. Ingrid would not fail now. “Even if they resent us, even if they don’t trust us, I will still protect them.” She sighed. “We owe them a great debt, after all. I wouldn’t want to default on it now.”

Now, Dorothea was sighing, too, her lips curving until they resolved into a weak smile. “Oh, Ingrid. You are the second-most selfless person I have ever met in my life. But being selfless all the time isn’t good for you, you know.”

“Ugh, it’s not selflessness.” No, this wasn’t a fight. Ingrid didn’t _want _it to be a fight. Ingrid took a breath, steadied herself, and _willed _herself to be able to explain her reasoning without raising her voice. “As long as Garreg Mach is our base, it’s our duty to protect the people still living around the monastery. It’s _my _duty to protect them. That’s what the Church was supposed to do for them, but the compact was broken, and now—“ She broke off. Squinted at Dorothea. “Wait. You said ‘second-most.’ Who’s the first?”

Immediately, Ingrid knew that this had been the wrong question to ask—and if not wrong, then it was at least highly off-course from _correct_. Dorothea shoulders slumped, her head pitching forward a few inches, so that her face was obscured by a curtain of dark hair too thick to let any light shine through. Her shawl fell slack around her shoulders, the ends pooling at her sides. The hands Ingrid would have expected to find curled into fists instead sat loose and lax in her lap.

“Hey.” Ingrid reached out cautiously, set a hand on Dorothea’s shoulder. She had expected it to shake under her touch, but instead, Dorothea’s shoulder was still as stone. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t—“

“My mother.” And just like that, Dorothea sat up straight again, like someone pulling taut a puppet’s strings. Even her sudden smile looked like something that would be painted onto a wooden face. “And maybe if she had been a little more selfish, she’d still be alive. But there’s only so much food you can give someone else to eat, only so many days you can go without eating, yourself, before you’re beyond anyone’s ability to help you.”

Images of her parents’ drawn faces rose unbidden in Ingrid’s mind. She swallowed down bile.

“And I didn’t even notice it until that morning when she couldn’t get out of bed,” Dorothea was muttering, her painted-on smile vanished in favor of a scowl that Ingrid knew from bitter experience to be directed entirely inwards.

They’d had some similar experiences in childhood, after all. There were some commonalities, after all. But the stakes were so much higher when there were no villages obligated to turn over part of their harvest to you, and the consequences much sharper.

“I am so sorr—“

“Don’t be sorry.” Ingrid was held to silence by Dorothea’s tone. Not sharp, not gentle, not scolding, and not conciliatory. None of those things, and yet all of them at once. “Don’t be sorry, Ingrid. Just don’t follow her down into her grave.”

This would normally have been the point where Ingrid interrupted her. Or so she thought; their past arguments over this topic all tended to run together in Ingrid’s head, but she had the feeling that, were she following the same script, she would have interrupted Dorothea right about now. And she still _could_, and knew exactly what she would say if she did—_It is my duty to fight, to protect, and if I must die doing these things, so be it_—but this time…

_“Weep for you, I suppose.”_

(Had that been how she put it? Or had blood loss implanted fantasies in the fabric of Ingrid’s memory?)

Ingrid remained silent, listening for the words that would follow, the words that, if not thrown off-course by her interruptions, if she really, _really _listened to them, might finally arrive at the destination they’d intended.

“I know—“ and almost as soon as Ingrid had decided not to interrupt Dorothea, Dorothea was cutting herself off, frowning. She was silent a moment, running her thumbnail over a thick, ornate sleeve cuff, before continuing, “I know you mean well. I know that many of the other knights here…” she paused, a bitter smile playing across her mouth, just long enough for Ingrid’s heart to jump at ‘other’ “…mean well. But vows are like contracts, aren’t they?”

She finally looked into Ingrid’s face, wearing an expression that Ingrid didn’t think she’d ever seen there before. Not masklike, not theatrical. Just the firm, slightly grim worry of a woman fighting a war, a woman trying to keep death at bay, for herself and for others. “Say too many of them, sign too many of them, and they’re like a spider web for the unwary. The people who feel the most obliged to uphold them are the ones most vulnerable to being taken advantage of by the unscrupulous. Well…” She looked away for a moment, a glint like steel in her eyes. “…The desperate are vulnerable, too. It’s what you want.” She smiled. “I know. I just worry when it seems like you’re not even _thinking _of all the ways people can take advantage of you when you have vows you won’t break, no matter what. Lord Gwendal was a butcher, but I remember what they said about Lord Lonato’s knights, too.”

“They fought to the bitter end,” Ingrid supplied, the cold sinking into her stomach. “They would not abandon their liege lord, even if it meant making themselves the enemy of the Church.”

“And making yourself an enemy of Lady ‘It is the duty of the faithful to punish the wicked’ isn’t the smartest thing you could ever do.” Dorothea grimaced. “We were around that woman for a year. I think that’s enough time for us both to know that making an enemy of her is actually the _dumbest_ thing you could _ever _do. She’s probably going to want Edie’s skull for a soup bowl when we get her out of wherever she’s being held,” she muttered, and went on, too quickly for Ingrid to make any comments about that aside, “Ingrid. Please, tell me.” Ingrid tried not to flinch as Dorothea’s long, slender hands enveloped her own, but the press of skin was pleasurable in a way that blood loss and nausea wasn’t around to blunt. “What are you going to do if you swear vows of loyalty to a liege lord who uses that vow to order you to do something…”

That was where she trailed off. Not that Ingrid needed her to go on. Ingrid had not spent these past five years sleeping, and she could recite any of a hundred tales to choke the air from their lungs and haunt their dreams.

“I…” Empty armor gleamed with slick, dark blood. Its jagged edges caught the light like fevered lines of fire. And the words were out of her mouth before she fully realized what they were: “I don’t know.”

She felt empty.

She felt like she might cry.

Dorothea ran her thumbs gently over Ingrid’s knuckles. “That’s a start,” she murmured. “At least when you admit you don’t know, that means you can start thinking about it.”

“But I want to live up to the stories I grew up on, you know.” The words tumbled from Ingrid’s mouth. “I know the stories leave out much of what happens in real life.” They never spoke of how terrible death could be, never spoke of how the living left behind would be left behind utterly desolate. “But I _do _think it’s worth trying to live up to the ideal of what a knight should be.”

“Hey, I never said _that _was a bad idea,” Dorothea assured her. The sun peeked out from behind another fast-moving cloud, bathing them in balmy light. Dorothea’s earrings glittered like terrestrial starlight; the ring sparkled like an actual star. “So long as we’re both agreed that real life isn’t the same as those stories, I don’t mind it at all. All I ever wanted was for you to not be blinded by all the stars in your eyes.” She smiled, almost reminiscently, though Ingrid couldn’t imagine why. “I can just see you…”

“I have always wanted to protect the weak.” Why this, why now, why so freely? She felt giddy, like someone had pumped strong wine directly into her veins, and it had certainly been successful in loosening her tongue. “After the king died, there were so many problems with raiding, and I always wondered where all the knights were. I always wondered what they were doing, if not protecting the innocent. You’d hear tales of whole villages burned to the ground, all of the villagers missing, and I thought that if I was older, if I was stronger—“

_if I wasn’t a woman, if I wasn’t a noblewoman, wasn’t duty-bound to have as many children as quickly as possible, to be an empty vessel for someone else’s desires, why do I have dreams I’m not made for, why do I still dream of them now_

“—I would go out and find them. Save them, if they were still alive to save, and if not, I’d drag their killers back to Fhirdiad in chains to face judgment. I wanted to do justice. I wanted to be just, I wanted to make this world safe, I wanted for people to be able to lie down to sleep without being afraid of what would come to them in the night.”

The answer: she still had these dreams because her heart and her head really weren’t on speaking terms. And perhaps it was just the lot of everyone who drew breath to dream about things that were denied them.

But the world had been overturned completely since their time at school here. Ingrid had not been made to field a suitor in more than five years, and she knew that would start up again once peace reigned once more over Fódlan, but what if it didn’t? What if Séverin, or Marcel, or her younger brother Henrik, who would be old enough to start courting in a few years, happened to marry a well-connected woman with a rich dowry? What if someone went mining in the hills and found copper or iron or silver or gold? What if, after the war, her father or one of her brothers was awarded a lucrative post in the royal court?

What if she woke up, one day, and discovered that she had the freedom to pursue her dreams, after all?

Ingrid stole a glance at Dorothea. What would she do, if she had that freedom?

If Dorothea had any inkling of what was going through Ingrid’s mind, she gave no sign. “You sound like how I feel about singing,” she remarked. “I love to sing, especially to an audience—a great shock, I’m sure,” she added dryly. “The nobles all sit in the balconies and the box seats, so far away and so deep in shadow that I couldn’t make out their faces from the stage if I tried.” She threaded a hand through her hair, an odd, almost tender ambivalence stamping itself across her face. “The faces you can see from the stage are the poor, the downtrodden. Well,” she corrected herself, “the most downtrodden and most destitute aren’t there; they don’t have the money for a ticket. But the kind of people you get down in the front rows, they had probably been saving up for their tickets for months, maybe a couple of years, depending on the show or what kind of work they do.

“They come in, and when I first come out on the stage, they look so tired, so worn down,” Dorothea said softly. “Like I did when I was first picked up by the Mittelfrank Company. You spend so much time doing what it takes to stay alive, and you don’t have time for anything else. No time for dreams, no time to attend to yourself beyond the most basic necessities. So you get tired, and worn down, because you don’t have time to relax, and you don’t have time to dream.

“But then I start to sing, and I’m supposed to keep my eyes on all of the audience—supposed to look more at the rich people sitting in the boxes and the balconies, if I’m being honest—but I always focused more on the lower levels.” She laughed, not quite bitterly. “Not that management or the rich folks ever seemed to notice that I wasn’t paying them any mind. I start to sing, and I watch their faces start to change. They come in tired and worn down, but their eyes start to light up, some of the weariness starts to lift from their shoulders. They look their age again—Ingrid, you would not believe how much older than your years that sort of life can make you—and there’s that spark in their eyes.” She wavered, before rallying and going on to say, “Like they’ve finally remembered how to dream again. I don’t know how long it lasts once they leave the opera house, the night air hits their faces, and they remember what awaits them at home, but while it lasts… While it lasts, the feeling I inspire in them is the most wonderful thing in the world.”

And for a moment, Ingrid could picture it in her mind’s eye: a woman on a brightly lit stage, glowing like gold and silver and eternal, ineffable starlight, spinning with her voice a vision so vivid that the props no longer looked like wooden cutouts, and the stage no longer looked like a stage, and if you were watching, you would be transported so far away from your life that your life would feel like the phantasm, not the vision before you.

Making people believe in dreams again. Ingrid could see how that would feel wonderful.

But something else was brooding there, just past the edge of the light.

“Dorothea…” And maybe this was presumptuous, maybe this was overreaching, but Ingrid had just bared her soul and she felt like, if only this once, she was _allowed_. “I… think I may be confused. She could at least keep her voice soft, could at least keep it mild with something like conciliation. “You’ve spoken about how wonderful your life at the opera was. But you’ve also said things that…”

A preventable death. A jealousy-fueled mutilation. Stories Ingrid knew only the faintest shape of, shapes that might never be filled in. Morbid curiosity wanted every last line and shade; concern for the dreams that haunted Dorothea’s mind at night (nothing like recollecting them to another to bring them back to the forefront of your mind, in colors more vivid than they ever wore in life) wanted it all to be as vague and sketchy as possible.

“…That made it sound like it was terrible beyond endurance. Which is the truth?”

To Ingrid’s surprise, Dorothea laughed brightly, loudly. “Oh, Ingrid.”

Ingrid hadn’t _thought _the question sounded silly. “What is it?”

Still smiling, with surprising mirth that soon gave way to something considerably more wistful, “Both are true, Ingrid.” She sighed, rolling her shoulders. “Trust me, something can be wonderful and terrible at the same time, especially if you give your whole life over to it.”

“I…” Ingrid peered at Dorothea’s face, searching for signs of distress. Only after finding none, just finding that wistfulness, did she go on, “I never did hear you say why it is that you left Mittelfrank.”

Ingrid half-expected the conversation to end right there. Given all the things she had heard Dorothea say about the opera company, she wouldn’t have been surprised if Dorothea had shut down the conversation completely. Some things were unspeakable. That knowledge was carved into the underside of Ingrid’s skin.

As it was, Dorothea stiffened, then let all of that tension out on a long sigh. “It was a lot of things,” she admitted, not quite tiredly. “I got a taste of something here that you can’t get back in Enbarr, not if you’re me. Enbarr was changing thanks to the war, as well. I’ve always had a bit of a love-hate relationship with the city, but the more time went on, the less I recognized it at all.” A bruised hand waved in the air. “Ticket prices went up, until the only people who could still afford to come see a show were the wealthy people determined to make me into some sort of spectacle. The kind of people who rub elbows with top management and get granted ‘special privileges’; _not _the kind of audience I want to sing to, night after night, with no one else around.

“And…” Dorothea reached up, pressing her fingers to her forehead as if warding off a headache or a bad memory. “…You hear things, in Enbarr. The gossip circuit flies faster than the wind. You hear things about what’s going on in Fódlan, and I looked at my life with the opera, and it felt…” She stared down at her lap. “It felt like I wasn’t doing anything _real_. Like nothing I was doing mattered, in the grand scheme of things.”

_Giving hope to the downtrodden isn’t meaningless, _Ingrid did not say, for Dorothea had been barred from even that during her last years in Enbarr.

“Of course, sometimes I wonder how much of a difference I’m making here, too,” Dorothea remarked with a bitterness as mordant as vitriol, her words almost not making it past Ingrid’s thoughts as she leaned back in the bench, resting her right hand palm down on the wood, left hand lying in her lap.

“You make a difference for every person on the battlefield or down in the villages who doesn’t die because you’re here to protect them,” Ingrid argued. “That’s not meaningless.”

“You’re sweet,” Dorothea murmured to her with a small, almost secretive smile that sent a frisson up Ingrid’s spine, heedless of how inappropriate that was in this moment. That smile faded to make way for a sigh. “I suppose it’s a good stand-in for what I used to want, however long it might last.”

Ingrid frowned. “What you used to want?”

A soft, bell-like laugh. “You know _what_. But I’m older now, and I know better.” Dorothea tipped her head up towards the sky and smiled again. Not a bitter smile, not a wistful one, not cheery, not sad. Ingrid couldn’t have said what that smile was if she had the rest of her life to do it. “No one is ever going to want to marry me for love.”

Somehow, Ingrid just couldn’t believe that.


	6. Chapter Six

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [**CN/TW**: Internalized homophobia]

It was amazing how pleasant it was to be around Dorothea when all Ingrid felt was the fluttering of butterflies in her stomach, and questions of shared values and ideals never entered into it. Oh, Ingrid couldn’t really be of use around the monastery—Dorothea had gotten the message, just as clearly as the rest, that Ingrid was _not _to do anything strenuous until her shoulder had fully healed—but helping Dorothea corral the small army of children she oversaw was at least time she could spend doing _something_, and in Dorothea’s company, to boot.

(The acquaintance was clearly of long standing. Also, the children all obeyed Dorothea much more readily than they did Ingrid, enough so that it was immediately noticeable. There was a story in that, she was sure. But it was something that was perhaps better left for another day.)

Telling her was…

That was perhaps inadvisable, at present. (If not now, when?) They were fighting a war, and such things would serve only to distract them. (The words could never be spoken if one of them died.) And still, _still_, Ingrid was not certain that such a thing could really last in real life. Not for her, and not for someone with her… obligations. Call it caution, call it cowardice, but she was more interested in fostering her fragile dreams somewhere they couldn’t be dashed to pieces on the floor, for now. (If they never saw the sun, if they never braved the wind, they would never live.)

After this war was won, perhaps. That would certainly give Ingrid added incentive to see it won quickly, to see it through alive. At the finish line, there was Faerghus free, the faces of her family she’d not seen in five years, and—

_All this is assuming she’d have me._

Ingrid would tell her, when there was peace in the land again. When the earth was healed of its wounds, when the rain ceased to feel like bitter tears, when the meager crops were fed by something other than blood, when the nights were quiet and there were no fires glowing on the horizons, Ingrid would tell her. When the knowledge would not be one more burden on shoulders already laden down with such, Ingrid would tell her.

(She could hear laughter in her ears again.)

Of course, all that was provided that a certain someone was patient enough to wait that long.

-0-0-0-

“Okay, first thing’s first: how’s your shoulder?”

‘First thing’s first’ did not fill Ingrid with optimism; it drained her of anything that could even approach the word. ‘First thing’s first’ implied that more things were to follow, and with Sylvain, the presence of ‘more things’ that had not yet been divulged was rarely positive, and more often headache-inducing. Sylvain… had not been spending quite as much time hitting on (seducing, abandoning) women lately as he had once been wont; even Sylvain had to be sobered at least somewhat by the horrors of war, it seemed. But it was hardly as if women were the only portion of his personal affairs he was reckless in, so Ingrid could feel a headache coming on, nonetheless.

“Stiff, but Professor Manuela tells me that’s normal, and that it might be some time before that goes away, even once I’m fit to work again.” They were out on one of the terraces out to the side of the cathedral—Ingrid liked the view of the mountains from there—and if there was anything the cold wind was doing for her, it was keeping her head from throbbing too badly. For however long that lasted, anyways. “You said ‘first thing.’” Ingrid turned to Sylvain, who was standing in one of the side doorways to the cathedral with his hands clasped, almost sheepishly, behind his back. “What’s the second?”

Sylvain hurried away from the doorway. Ingrid didn’t think there were too many people in there besides Dimitri—Dimitri was grown quite… proficient at clearing a room out in a hurry, regardless of the function of said room (even Seteth was reluctant to perform his daily inspections of the cathedral unaccompanied, and would _not _allow Flayn to join him)—but perhaps Sylvain thought that Dimitri, even as he was now, would greet his girl troubles with a groan and a lecture, as he had been wont to do, once upon a time. And maybe Dimitri _would _respond that way, and the result would be so jarring that Sylvain would never sleep with a woman again, not outside the bonds of matrimony.

But that was wishful thinking—both regarding Sylvain, and Dimitri. They could not turn back the hands of time, could they? Not enough to salvage Dimitri’s mind, and not enough to forestall whatever had set Sylvain down the path he had walked for nearly as long as Ingrid had known him. Better to focus on the present.

“Oh, just, you know.”

Ah, the tone of deceptive casualness. Maybe Ingrid really would need money to pay a weregild, this time.

No, wait. Sylvain had a lot more money than she did. He could pay his own Goddess damned weregild.

“No, I _don’t _know. Whatever it is, you’d better just tell me.”

Standing next to her by the railing, Sylvain ran a hand through his hair, both eyebrows shot up close to his hairline. “This isn’t about me, Ingrid; you don’t have to worry. I just couldn’t help but notice…” Somewhat horrifyingly, he winked. “…You and Dorothea have been spending a lot of time together, right?”

And now, Ingrid would not bother dancing around the subject. Not this time. (She’d never been much of a dancer, anyways.) “I don’t need your ‘help,’ Sylvain.”

“Have you said anything to her yet?” Sylvain fired back.

‘Yes’ would sound faint—an obvious lie. Silence would have said volumes without having to say anything at all; Sylvain had always been good at reading more from her silence than Ingrid was willing to convey with words. This was not going to help her at _all_, but she might as well be upfront about it: “No.”

He must have expected this. He must surely have expected this. Ingrid _knew _him, and that knowledge flowed both ways. So when Sylvain jerked his head back, that did throw Ingrid, just a little bit.

“’No?’” Sylvain echoed her, in rising tones of disbelief. “Seriously? Why not?”

The idea of a wartime romance probably appealed to him, if he ever thought much about romance. Sylvain had only ever seriously courted danger, so this sort of thing probably appealed to him on an intellectual level. (It probably appealed to Dorothea as well, for it was something straight out of one of the high romances. Ingrid tried not to think about that. She’d cut her teeth on tales that featured love among bloodshed, and it had all seemed so thrilling at the time—though even then, she’d been more apt to put herself in the shoes of the knight than of his lady—but here was something Ingrid had never needed anyone to tell her was best to leave to tales: it was downright nauseating, that feeling of knowing that person was out on the battlefield with you, and Ingrid could only imagine how much worse it would feel if vows of love were exchanged.) Actually, wartime romances were appealing to a _lot _of people around here, though why didn’t quite make sense to—

It was the stories. Of course, it was the stories. Ingrid didn’t know why she’d ever thought that a mystery.

“We don’t have time for that right now, Sylvain. You can’t have failed to notice there’s a war on.”

“All the more reason to say something _now_, in case something happens to one of you.” Ingrid knew very well that something could happen to one of them; she neither needed nor desired Sylvain’s reminders. “Anything can happen out on the battlefield, Ingrid.”

He meant well. Ingrid knew that, and that knowledge was why she was suppressing visions of herself pinching his head off of his neck between her thumb and her forefinger. “I am well aware of that, Sylvain. But don’t you think it would just be a huge distraction to us both?” she added meaningfully, praying he’d understand enough to back off, at least. “We already have so much we ought to be doing, so much we ought to be thinking about. Why add this to all of that?”

She hadn’t worked out what she was going to say. She had no idea if she was going to bring up the ring, if she could bear to explain the stupid, ill-understood impulse that had seen her offer it to Dorothea in the first place. (Still dreaded the idea of rejection, of being laughed at—and not even mockingly; even the sharpest-edged visions in her mind couldn’t conjure that up—and being told that this wasn’t what women did with women. That was a line of thought that did naught but hurt her, and to no good end, and Ingrid would have liked to tear it out of her head by the roots, but easier said than done.)

It seemed to Ingrid that she shouldn’t be making a confession when she still had no idea what she was going to _say_.

“I’m not doing this right now, Sylvain,” she told him, and even then, she knew it wasn’t going to be enough. “Just leave it alone.”

Oh, look, that sinking feeling in her stomach had translated itself into the exterior world, and more quickly than even Ingrid had expected. Sylvain shook his head violently, deep lines grooved into his forehead. “I’m _not _just gonna ‘leave it alone,’ Ingrid; that’s a stupid plan!”

“Excuse me? Like you’ve ever—“

“You’ve got to learn how to live in the present,” Sylvain cut in, and Ingrid could just _see _the images flashing through his mind, even if they didn’t match reality, even if they were completely unsustainable. “Life’s just gonna pass you by if you don’t go out and live it.”

How many times had she had to comfort a crying girl, now? How many times had she had to smooth things over with an angry brother, father, cousin, _friend_? “’Live in the present?’” Maybe they’d start talking so loudly that Dimitri would be distracted from his muttering long enough to come over and tell them both to shut up. Maybe he’d actually be _curious_. (Fires of Ailell, Ingrid hoped not. She really didn’t want to deal with Dimitri’s brand of cynicism, today.) “Is that what you call what you do, ‘living in the present?’” Her face hardened in a scowl and a glare. “Why don’t you ever look towards the future, then? The future will be your present, some day, and all you seem to feel like doing is ensure your present tomorrow will be just as chaotic as your present today. Why should I want to live like that?!”

For a moment, Ingrid thought she might have managed to at least put a crack in his endless blithe indifference to consequences. He faltered, mouth working and nothing coming out, with a gleam in his eyes that Ingrid did not recognize—and considering just how long she had known him, that was saying something. (She could not remember a time from before she knew him. Not a single clear memory that could be definitively marked ‘before Sylvain.’ By blood, he was not family, but by virtually every other measure, he was, and Ingrid wondered sometimes if they would still be having these conversations if that was not so.)

But the moment passed, and his expression changed with the same disconcerting speed he’d always been capable of, for reasons Ingrid couldn’t say she understood. “Sounds to me like you just need one last push.”

“Sylvain,” Ingrid said flatly, “that is not what I need.”

“Just trust me on this.”

“Why _should _I?”

Pig-headedly stubborn as he was, Sylvain was already heading back for the door. “I’m going on a scouting mission this afternoon, and I’m not gonna be back until the day after tomorrow. But I promise, when I get back, I’ll help you out.”

She’d probably be better off if a loose brick fell from a wall and hit her on the head. “Your ‘help’ has been completely useless!” Ingrid called after him.

From inside the cathedral, entirely too confidently, “Trust me!”

And only the fact that it was Ingrid’s turn to watch Dimitri kept her from running after him.

Oh, yes, Ingrid could definitely hear laughter on the wind now. Just going by how mocking it was, if he’d still had it in him to care at all about what his old friends were getting up to while he muttered and snarled and waited for the next battle, Ingrid would have thought it was Dimitri laughing. For better or worse, she thought the laughter sounded a lot more _ethereal _than all that.

It looked like she wasn’t going to be waiting until there was peace in the land to say something, after all.

But she was going to be damned if she did it on Sylvain’s terms, not so long as she had any other option.

-0-0-0-

“Felix. Of course, you’re here.”

Her relief in the duty of watching over the man determined to spawn stories of a vengeful ghost haunting the cathedral hadn’t arrived until a few hours later, and despite the hour of the day, Ingrid had seen fit to forego lunch a while longer. She had bigger concerns than her stomach.

Felix was hunched over a pile of rusted swords stacked up on the hard-packed earth, the spoils of their last scouting mission. Taken from the corpses of bandits or exceptionally poorly-equipped and outfitted Imperial soldiers, Ingrid didn’t know (she suspected the former, honestly; many things could be said of Edelgard, but Ingrid had never seen a soldier of the Emperor’s who didn’t have high-quality gear at their disposal), but either way, they needed to be scrubbed clean of rust before a decision could be made on whether they were fit to use, and for whatever reason, Felix had decided that that was his job. It was, in fact, about all he’d been doing these past couple of days; maybe he was trying to avoid his father.

And if he _was _trying to avoid his father, that was something that warranted a conversation. But not right now. Felix’s family troubles would keep. This wouldn’t.

From his spot on the floor, Felix eyed her almost suspiciously. “Your shoulder hasn’t healed.”

“That’s not what I’m here for,” Ingrid assured him hastily. It occurred to her suddenly that this would mark the first time she’d spoken to him about Dorothea. She could hardly believe that Felix didn’t know any of what was going on, but she also didn’t know how _much _he knew. ‘Felix’ and ‘girl troubles’ were not two things that, in any sane world, typically went together.

This world they’d been given was not a particularly sane one.

“Sylvain hasn’t been by here, has he?”

_If he’s been talking about this with Felix behind my back, I am going to replace all of his cologne with pegasus urine. _After _I’ve had a little chat with the cooks about what they should be feeding him—Sylvain’s a little overdue for gruel. _Never mind that it would have been a lot easier to talk about this with Felix if Sylvain _had _gone to him behind her back. She did not want to think he’d gotten this far with his relationship meddling.

Felix snorted. “No, he blew off training again. Why?”

Well, he wasn’t immediately regarding her with the gimlet eye of ‘why do I have to deal with your interpersonal problems?’ (The answer, naturally, would have been: ‘because I have to deal with all of yours.’) That was something.

“I ran into him earlier today; he told me he’s going on a scouting mission, and he won’t be back until the day after tomorrow. When he gets back, can you…” Goddess, this felt ridiculous even to think about, let alone _say_. “…Can you distract him for a few hours?”

As quickly as it had vanished, that suspicion had returned, now accompanied by the gimlet eye of ‘why are you trying to involve me in something I know absolutely nothing about?’ “……Why?”

Laughter that Ingrid knew would sound hysterical to the point of unhinged bubbled in her throat, barely suppressed. “I don’t suppose you could agree to do as I’ve asked without an explanation why.”

“No,” Felix said simply, pointedly returning to his sword-cleaning.

So this was how it was going to be, huh?

_Fine_.

Seeing nothing else to do, Ingrid steeled herself, and told him _exactly _why.

The story wasn’t long in the telling (Ingrid felt justified in leaving some things out), but the series of confused, annoyed, and mildly disgusted faces that Felix made as she told him made her feel as if it was taking a whole lot longer. One of those faces in particular, Ingrid hadn’t seen since they were seven and left in the care of one of Felix’s cousins, who had a very, umm, _amorous _suitor come over while their parents were away. She hadn’t realized he still knew how to make that face; she thought it might be a bit too expressive for him. (And honestly, she would have hoped he’d grown up enough to not _want _to make that face.)

When Ingrid concluded the somewhat abbreviated tale of How We Got Here, Felix didn’t speak. That, in and of itself, wasn’t terribly unusual for him; Ingrid had _hoped _he’d take a moment to digest all of this before saying anything more.

Finally, he eyed her as if he’d never seen her before. “…Dorothea?”

Ingrid nodded.

Felix’s face screwed up. “_Why_?”

“What do you mean, ‘why?’”

His eyes darted around the room, appealing to an audience that wasn’t going to materialize, no matter what he did. “She’s insufferable!”

Ingrid groaned. “To you, maybe, but not to me.”

Felix made a garbled noise in the back of his throat, a bit like a cat being strangled. “Well, congratulations on your shitty taste in women.”

Ingrid allowed herself a moment to be almost giddily grateful that he wasn’t questioning why she’d be seriously looking at a woman in the first place (hardly unheard-of… for people who didn’t have the obligations she’d been born with), before forging on: “So, you’ll help me?”

And Felix took the opportunity to make her feel just as disappointed as she’d been grateful a second ago. “No. Deal with it yourself.”

Which… wasn’t going to work. At this point, Ingrid was realistic enough to accept that she was going to _need _the extra time a distraction could give her. And given all the situations Felix had been in the past that she had helped him get out of, Ingrid would _really _have thought he owed her one by now.

Ingrid told him as much, and the particular way that Felix’s face screwed up told her that she was gaining no traction here. Really, the words that followed—“We’re not children anymore, and you need to deal with your own problems, and _leave me out of them_.”—were just redundant.

Fine. Let’s try another tack.

“You know…” Ingrid narrowed her eyes at Felix. “Your father still wonders what happened to that pair of moleskin gloves. He brought it up to me just the other day.”

Admittedly, this tack made Ingrid feel like a nine-year-old again, but there was no helping it.

Felix could not have looked less impressed than if someone had just tried to tell him that his ability with a sword was only that of a novice. Ingrid… hadn’t realized he could look so unimpressed, actually. “And Mercedes still wonders what happened to that plate of ginger cookies she made for the class when we were in school.”

“Sylvain’s address book.”

“The boar’s cloak clasp.”

Surely, even the suggestion of bringing _Dimitri _into this represented escalation. A lot of it. “All the cake Lysithea tried to give you, that you just threw away like a wasteful ass.” And bringing Lysithea into this was escalation, too, but tit for tat, and all that.

“_Bernadetta’s door_.”

“Felix.” This could have gone on all afternoon—Ingrid couldn’t remember a time definitively identified as ‘before Felix’ any more than a time ‘before Sylvain’, and that had its consequences. Best to put an end to this, right _now_. “While I was living with you, your father asked me to go looking for you one day, when you were late to supper. While I was looking for you, I happened to search your room. Do you want to know what I found there?”

They must have really regressed to the _actual _age of nine. Ingrid couldn’t remember the last time her voice had taken on quite such a sing-song note, but she was probably actually nine. Maybe she’d get what she wanted out of this conversation, but Ingrid was less certain whether her dignity would survive the experience.

Oh, well. If her dignity died a fiery death, she could foster a new sense of it, later.

Felix eyed her the way a hunter eyed a mountain lion they hadn’t expected to encounter in the woods. “A lot of blades?”

Well, _yes_, but… “No, Felix, that’s not what I found.” Ingrid smiled thinly down at him. _I may not know where all the bodies are buried, but I know where _yours _is going to be buried if this gets out_. “I found a little black book with something very interesting written inside.”

Felix didn’t reply, but Ingrid thought she saw his face pale, ever so slightly.

Ingrid tapped the side of her jaw with one finger, mouth quirked in a wry little expression, almost a smile. “If I remember correctly—and I think I _am _remembering correctly, Felix—they were song lyrics. But you’ve _never _had much interest in songwriting, so I wonder where—“

“Alright!” Felix’s hand shot out so fast that someone else, were they in Ingrid’s place, might have been alarmed. But he held that hand out, palm towards Ingrid, and she hadn’t expected anything else. He glared up at her, but it was the glare of defeat. “You’ve made your point.”

Ingrid nodded crisply. “I shouldn’t need more than a couple of hours, but really, however much time you can give me would be appreciated.”

Having apparently _completely _conceded defeat, Felix cast his gaze around the training grounds, jaw set. “I’ll try to keep him pinned down here. He needs to train more, anyways.”

There were some who might argue that Felix didn’t have the most realistic ideas regarding what constituted appropriate amounts of training. Under certain circumstances, Ingrid was one of those people. But it suited her well, this time. She wasn’t going to complain.

“Alright. I’ll come and let you know when it’s safe to let him go.”

That could potentially take a while, provided Ingrid didn’t manage to work up the nerve to talk to Dorothea before the day of. Their conversations had taken a turn for the lengthy, lately. This wasn’t how she’d wanted it. One way or another, no matter the outcome, this was how it would have to be.

Just before Ingrid turned to leave Felix with his pile of rust-coated swords, he grimaced and shook his head. “_Dorothea_?”

…And that tone of disbelief was thoroughly unflattering, thank you very much. “I don’t have to justify myself to you.”

He snorted. “I thought Ashe or Leonie would be more your type.”

What went unsaid, but could still clearly be heard following: _‘You always admired the knightly.’_

Well, that was true, in a sense. Ingrid had always wanted to be a knight. And admiration was… Hmm. Felix was in a better position to know than most. But only Ingrid could ever know her own heart in full.

Ingrid shrugged. “There’s a difference between the ones my father picks out for me, and the ones I’m inclined to look at, unprompted.”

Felix stared down at the sword he had been cleaning when she came in. He ran his thumb almost absently over the scratched hilt. “That makes sense.” But then, he looked up at her, eyebrow raised, and completely ruined the moment with, “You _still _have shitty taste in women.”

“Duly noted,” Ingrid told him, rolling her eyes. And because the name of the game _was _tit for tat, and because if she was going to regress to the age of nine, she might as well have some fun with it: “And Felix? Maybe next time, you should keep that book somewhere more secure. Imagine what Annette would do if she found it while she was cleaning.” Ingrid smirked. “She might never sing again.”

That shade of red that Felix’s face flushed, though, Ingrid _had _seen it a few times since they were nine. But not often.

“Fuck off,” Felix snarled.

Ingrid was realistic enough to know that she was going to be hearing about this again, eventually. She was in a better position than most to know that Felix could hold a grudge for years, better than anyone else she knew. (Well, almost anyone. But Ingrid wasn’t certain how well she knew Dimitri, these days. She wasn’t certain how well she’d ever known him, these days.) But she’d worry about that later. She had enough to worry about in the present, without adding the future on to it.

-0-0-0-

And Ingrid tried to work herself up to broaching the subject with Dorothea while Sylvain was gone. Truly, she did. But every time she saw Dorothea, she felt like her mind was completely falling apart—at least, whatever part of her mind was supposed to govern composing intelligible speech. It wasn’t just that she couldn’t bring herself to confess; it was all she could do to excuse herself from the situation at hand without making a complete fool out of herself.

Which was probably giving Dorothea a very specific impression, but Ingrid was trying not to think about that.

Her repeated, aborted attempts to make her mind string together something more elaborate than “……Hi” when she was in Dorothea’s presence was what led Ingrid to the dining hall on the day Sylvain was scheduled to return from his scouting mission. She didn’t know if he was back, yet, could only count on Felix to hold to his word and distract him long enough for Ingrid to thread her mind back together and get the knots out of her tongue.

_It’s got to be today. It’s got to be now. I just…_

‘I like you’ was a little juvenile for their age and their situations. (Then again, Ingrid had secured Felix’s aid by means that could definitely be argued to be juvenile.) ‘I love you’ was… Ingrid wasn’t sure what this was. ‘I love you’ felt too momentous; as little experience as she’d had initiating these conversations, she knew it wasn’t the sort of thing you _lead _with.

They could sit down and eat together, at least. And since Lord Rodrigue had joined them with more soldiers and more food, the meals in the dining hall had actually been somewhat pleasant.

Ingrid collected her bowl of stew and began to scan the tables, trying to pick out where Dorothea had sat down. She’d never known her to take her lunch to go—something about enjoying being able to actually sit down and eat without being afraid someone else would steal it. (Sometimes, Ingrid wondered at Dorothea’s patience. If she had spent years eating every meal with the fear that someone was going to come along and steal it constantly swirling in the back of her mind, she suspected she would have been arrested for manslaughter by now.) So, somewhere in this hall…

At last, she spotted Dorothea sitting halfway down the table on the far left side, deep in conversation with Mercedes, who sat across from her, and with Bernadetta glued to her side, picking at her stew.

So, a group she trusted, at least.

As Ingrid went to sit down by Mercedes, Bernadetta flashed her a weak smile, which Ingrid returned. Bernadetta had slowly been getting a little better about leaving her room during the sunlit hours for something that wasn’t an absolute emergency, and much as Ingrid would have liked to provide encouragement, she was afraid that drawing attention to it would just make Bernadetta backslide. So she smiled, gave a small nod, and took a few exploratory gulps of stew.

Hmm, garlic. They hadn’t had that in a while. (The meat was pork. Ingrid willed herself not to focus overmuch on the way it smelled.)

Meanwhile, Dorothea and Mercedes were too engrossed in their conversation to pay too much attention to their lunch, or even to the two women sitting close by them.

“So what do you want to do next?” Dorothea asked, tapping her fingers restlessly against the side of her green, glazed bowl. The ring she wore (_the ring I gave her, the ring she never acknowledges as anything more than a trinket, should I take that as a sign, should I take that as a signal_) caught the weak light that passed through clouds and through windows, flashing and sparkling like sunlight on water. Ingrid’s gaze was transfixed upon it—it was easier than looking at Dorothea’s face. “Do you want to keep on going with embroidery, or move on to teaching them how to repair clothing?”

Something to do with the pack of children that Ingrid had seen hanging around Dorothea so often, she would guess. Come to think of it, Ingrid had seen Mercedes with them as well. So that was how they spent their spare hours, was it?

Ingrid could hardly say she disapproved. Awkward as she was around children, she knew how badly children needed structure. (And stability, but true stability seemed far more elusive these days than nearly anything else, barring true peace. They’d take what they could get.)

Mercedes pursed her lips. “Let’s stick to embroidery, at least for now.” She smiled ruefully into her bowl. “I think it may have been better to start with clothing repair, but…”

“…But when we started, it was just something for them to do that wasn’t endless drudgery,” Dorothea supplied, grimacing. “And I see your point; we might as well get them up to mastery of the one before starting on the other.”

They fell to silence for a moment, a silence soon filled in by a heated discussion, almost argument, going on further down the table. Ashe, Annette, Flayn, and Lysithea had resurrected their old study group from their school days, though its purpose was somewhat different nowadays, geared much more towards self-study than homework assignments or exams. The timbre of their discussions, _especially _from Lysithea and Annette’s ends, were just as intense as ever, maybe even more so now that they were adults and Annette had finally surmounted that last ‘but girls should be light-hearted and sweet-tempered, always’ hurdle. In terms of intensity, neither Ashe nor Flayn could quite match them, but they were starting to catch up.

Ingrid thought about how the four of them, sans Lysithea and plus Mercedes, would react if she tried to have her planned conversation with Dorothea in earshot of them. Maybe she should ask Dorothea to join her outside, after all.

_Then I’ll just have Annette and Flayn, and maybe Ashe, as well, following us and eavesdropping. Annette has such good intuition for things like this that I swear she can read minds. Flayn’s almost as good. Maybe I should—_

But Ingrid cut the thought out at the roots. Today. It had to be today. One way or another, she’d have her answer, today. And if she got pestering or excited questions afterwards, she’d deal with it when it happened.

“I think they’re advanced enough for more elaborate designs, don’t you?” Mercedes was asking. The slight gloom that had dampened her smile when Dorothea spoke of ‘drudgery’ had vanished like a raincloud disappearing over the horizon. “I’d love to teach them how to blend different-colored threads; I’m sure Kadri would do wonderfully with that.”

“Huh, if we can find enough spools in different colors—“ grim amusement sat neither particularly well nor particularly poorly on Dorothea’s shoulders, but it seemed to be no stranger to her, either way “—than she probably will. We should probably introduce them to satin stitching, too.”

Then, Dorothea glanced over at Dorothea before catching Mercedes’s eye once more. When Mercedes nodded, Dorothea turned to Bernadetta, smiling gently. “Bern, Mercedes and I have been talking.” Given Dorothea’s propensity towards giving nicknames to anyone whose names both lent themselves towards such and whom she seemed decently fond of, Ingrid would have thought Dorothea would be calling her ‘Mercie.’ Apparently not. Maybe it was just something between her and Annette? “You know we’ve been teaching the children around the monastery how to sew and embroider. Would you like to join us when we teach them?”

The ensuing response was, in words, exactly what Ingrid had expected, though the tone was considerably less vehement than it could have been. Perhaps she was making progress in more ways than just one.

“No way!” Bernadetta protested, shaking her head violently. “That’s _way _too many people.” Ah, she had been asking for groups of five or less in her seminars, hadn’t she? She paused, frowning and stirring her stew around with her spoon. “I… I could write up some instructions about satin stitching, though. If you want.”

Another gentle smile unfurled over Dorothea’s mouth, this one laced with quiet reassurance. “That would be great. Thank you, Bern.”

Dorothea and Mercedes fell back to talking, while Bernadetta fell back to staring down into her bowl and Ingrid fell back to staring at Dorothea’s left hand. (The bruises had faded since that day out on the muddy green, mapping her knuckles a pale, jaundiced yellow that would no doubt recede entirely in a few days’ time. Funny how, in this moment, Ingrid couldn’t look at those bruises without wanting to hold Dorothea’s in her own and will them all away.) Maybe she’d ask Dorothea to come walk outside with her once they’d finished eating.

Maybe she’d let another opportunity pass her by.

“Is that one merchant, Anna, back yet?” Dorothea queried, lips pursed. “Her stuff’s always been a bit pricey, but for the merchants around here, she’s pretty good at…”

A commotion erupted at the door into the entrance hall, and Dorothea trailed off, craning her neck to get a better look at it. Mercedes looked that way as well, then Bernadetta, planting her hand on Dorothea’s shoulder so that she could lever herself up and look over her head. The dining hall wasn’t exactly crowded, and soon, pretty much everyone was looking at that doorway.

…Including Ingrid, whose anxiety had jumped from ‘sense of impending doom’ to ‘the only solution to anything anymore is that the earth swallow me whole’ the moment she saw what she was supposed to be looking at.

“Oh, no,” she muttered. Her blood might be thundering in her veins, but her voice was almost completely flat, oddly dreamlike in how toneless it was. “Oh, no. No, no, no, no.”

Judging by the way they were struggling, Ingrid had no doubt that Felix had at least _tried _to keep Sylvain from leaving the training grounds—or had tried to _get _him _to _the training grounds, depending on what stage of the operation he had been in when things had started to go south. But there was something Ingrid hadn’t considered when she had enlisted Felix’s aid. Felix was, for all that he was leanly muscled and thus quite slim, far stronger than he looked. It was something enemies had discovered too late, to their eternal cost. But all his strength could not change the fact that Sylvain was quite a bit bigger than he was, and thus not the easiest person to subdue. By a long shot.

Ingrid ducked her head, thanking whichever Saint had given her the sense to sit on the other side of the door from Mercedes. Maybe if he couldn’t see her, he’d give up. Maybe Felix would pry his hands from the doorframe and—

“DOROTHEA, INGRID GAVE YOU A WEDDING RING WHEN WE WERE IN SCHOOL.”

Or he could dispense with whatever flimsy pretext of subtlety he’d maintained before, and just do that.

He could always do that.

Silence reigned in the dining hall. Ingrid didn’t dare make eye contact with _anyone_.

“Wait, _what_?” Bernadetta asked in bewilderment, and then the noise level in the dining hall just… returned to normal. Albeit with a lot of whispering involved.

Face burning, Ingrid sprang up from her seat. She still didn’t dare make eye contact with anyone as she stalked down the aisle towards where Sylvain and Felix were standing. (She could feel a pair of eyes boring into her back. She didn’t need to turn around to know who it was.) Felix had managed to get Sylvain into a headlock by the time Ingrid had reached them, which put his face several inches closer to the ground than it would otherwise have been, which suited Ingrid _perfectly_.

“You,” she ground out, poking him in the face with her finger. Actually, this felt good; she was just going to keep doing this. “You, you, you…”

Felix shot a withering look down at the top of Sylvain’s head. “The moment I said something about training, he took off like a bat out of hell.” He nudged Sylvain’s leg with the side of his foot. “You sure can run fast, for someone who takes any excuse he can to duck out of training.”

“Can run faster than,” Sylvain tried to retort in a wheezy voice, before breaking off and coughing. Ingrid stared pitilessly into his face, and he seemed to sense that he would be getting approximately _nowhere _there, for he patted Felix’s arm and choked out, “Felix, buddy, can’t breathe…”

To be fair, Felix’s grip was pretty tight, and Felix was in a better position than Ingrid to know how tight it was. Felix sighed loudly, rolled his eyes, but did loosen his grip. Somewhat.

Sylvain cleared his throat, a noise like shifting wet sand. “It’s not like you were gonna do anything,” he told Ingrid, with a note of triumph in his voice that made her want to strangle him. “At least she knows now, right?”

“You made a spectacle out of us,” Ingrid hissed in return. “How is that helping?”

“You can’t duck out of it n—“

Felix nudged his leg again, almost hard enough to qualify as a kick, then nodded at something over Ingrid’s shoulder. “If you’re serious about this, you might want to go after that woman _now_. She’s leaving.”

Sure enough, Dorothea was heading out the door into the courtyard fenced in by overgrown hedges. Blood racing, Ingrid turned back to Felix and Sylvain just long enough to poke the latter in the face one last time—“This isn’t over”—before hurrying after Dorothea.

Because of course, Ingrid wasn’t the only one who had been made a spectacle of, and while Dorothea was no doubt accustomed to being the center of at least somewhat uninvited attention, that didn’t necessarily mean she welcomed it. _One way or another, we both live and die by our reputations, and I—_

She was going to thrash Sylvain the next time they sparred together. But at this moment, catching up to Dorothea and talking to her was more important.

Ingrid finally caught sight of Dorothea, standing under the weather-beaten gazebo. The tables and chairs had long since been carted away, leaving a tile floor pitted from where looters had years ago pried out all the jasper and rose quartz set into the tiles. She looked far too intact for a such a place as this.

“Dorothea?” By some miracle, Ingrid’s voice was clear enough as to be intelligible. (She was going to credit Saint Cethleann. Most people did, when something, no matter how minor, inexplicably went right in their relationship issues.) Whether this would last was anyone’s guess; the part of Ingrid’s mind that formed intelligible speech fell closer to unraveling with each moment that her pulse continued to elevate. “May we speak?”

Dorothea turned to her, and… She wasn’t crying. That was something.

“Yes.” She nodded distractedly. “Yes, I think we should.” And almost in the same breath, less distracted than agitated, “A _wedding ring_?”

Why she was taking that particular tone, Ingrid was uncertain. After Melusine had floated the possibility, Dorothea had latched onto it readily enough, if in something like jest. (And then just… given it away.) Then again, that had been a long time ago. Maybe Dorothea’s memory of that conversation had faded with time, and she no longer recalled exactly what she had said. That was possible.

“That typically requires a verbal agreement between the parties involved.” Ingrid shifted her weight from her left foot to her right, trying to ignore the way Dorothea’s gaze had taken a turn for the frantic as she searched her face. “A written one, signed by both parties involved and a third witness, if you think a parent might try to object and you wish to be careful. Sylvain was getting ahead of himself.”

Not by very much, though. Unless money changed hands, or it was passed between close kin, there weren’t too many reasons in Faerghus for why someone would be giving someone else a ring. In the moment, Ingrid had not fully understood the impulse that saw her reaching for a ring, when something like a necklace or a bracelet would have been marginally safer, somewhat less charged with significance. Yes, she had felt an attraction, even then; she’d been getting ahead of herself, too.

Not by very much.

Laughter bubble up from Dorothea’s mouth, high-pitched and cacophonous. She clutched at her skirt, twisting and fretting at the fabric. “I thought she was _joking_.”

Or perhaps she did recall that conversation, after all.

Ingrid was standing just outside the gazebo, washed by the light of a sun that might one day bring them spring. She did not dare come any closer. “I don’t know what Melusine thought she was doing.” It was, as ever, difficult to determine what thoughts guided Melusine’s actions, let alone her sparing words. “And I…” Best to draw the words out now, before they could fester and poison her. “…I am still not sure what guided my decision. I was…” She smiled weakly. “…Making a declaration I was in no position to hold to, at that time. When I actually stopped to think about it, I was almost glad you hadn’t chosen to keep it.”

Almost. She never could force herself to accept even a brittle happiness in the knowledge that nothing had changed, that no one’s reputations had been put under a cloud, that Ingrid would not face her father’s disapprobation, and Dorothea would not have to face gossip back in Enbarr. What she had felt instead was a stagnant sort of not-quite-contentment, shot through with bitterness that waned over the past five years, but never vanished. Sleeping, but not dead—just like everything else.

And judging by the way Dorothea’s whole body stiffened at once, it seemed she had homed in on that ‘almost,’ too.

“A _wedding ring_, though?” Dorothea echoed herself, voice pitching almost comically high. “You told me you got this—“ she held up her hand, now visibly shaking “—out of your own jewelry box.”

It would have been easier to be angry if she was not so visibly shaken. And suddenly, something she had never before considered was occurring to her for the first time. “Do… Do people in Enbarr not exchange rings to seal a wedding or betrothal?”

Oh, Goddess, if _that _was what this was, if the past five years had been like this because of a simple difference in _courting customs…_

Suddenly, Ingrid understood a little better why she kept hearing ethereal laughter when she was in Dorothea’s company. If she was in the Goddess’s position, Seiros’s, or one of the Saints’, she would have found all of this hilarious, in a pathetic kind of way.

“Rich people do,” Dorothea asserted, with a hint of that earlier cacophonous laughter lingering in her words. “_Rich people_ have rings made when they seek someone’s hand in marriage. Sometimes. Really, it’s not as common as it used to be; a lot of the married noblemen who patronize Mittelfrank don’t wear wedding rings anymore, not even the ones who aren’t looking at the girls as easy conquests. Giving someone one of your own pieces of jewelry is something you do for a _friend_, especially if you have the money to have new pieces made.” She ran a hand through her hair, throat visibly constricting. “And the last thing you said to me about this was ‘Back off,’ so what _else _was I supposed to think?”

“That’s…”

Ingrid gave in to an impulse that sprung up in the back of her mind a few seconds prior, and sank down on to the cold steps leading up into the gazebo. If she kept up like this, she might… Well, people collapsed to the ground reasonably often in the tales Ingrid had grown up on. Those characters were usually possessed of other attributes which made Ingrid completely despise them. She had no desire to emulate them. She would sit down, while her legs were still responding to commands as they ought.

(It might be more difficult to stand, later. The chill of the stone was sapping all the feeling from her legs.)

When Ingrid found the breath to carry on, “That’s not how we do it in the Kingdom. Very few people have the money to just commission new jewelry; most of what you obtain is either bought off of someone else, or passed down between family members. Even giving a piece of jewelry to a friend isn’t undertaken lightly. And when you give someone else a ring…”

“It’s understood that there’s only one reason why you’d be doing _that_.”

Ingrid didn’t bother feigning surprise. She’d always been sharp, and as an adult woman who no longer felt the need to sugarcoat any aspect of herself to make herself seem more agreeable to potential suitors, she did not hide that sharpness.

There came a rustle of silk from behind her, and then Dorothea was sitting down on Ingrid’s right. The wind shot out from behind them, blustering through Dorothea’s long hair and hiding her face. “So, from the top. I flirted with you, and you said you weren’t interested. You later changed your mind, and tried to give me a ring to signal that you actually were interested, that I gave to Melusine for safekeeping, which you took to mean that I wasn’t interested anymore.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “That you took to mean as a very pointed rejection, am I right?”

Ingrid only nodded. She didn’t trust herself to say anything else.

A choppy nod. “Okay, moving on. I took the ring back from her just before the Empire attacked the monastery, and this…” Dorothea stopped. Groaned. And then went on, “This is why I’ve been getting such mixed signals out of you these past couple of months, isn’t it?”

“Without a doubt,” Ingrid said with a sigh. “Since I never thought to figure out what it means when someone gives you a ring in Enbarr.”

Which was an oversight that really, _really _should not have been committed.

Dorothea waved a hand dismissively. “And I didn’t think to ask what it means in Faerghus; we’re even. Still…” She stared down at the ring, rolling it between her right thumb and forefinger. A high-pitched almost-screech of a laugh jittered out of her throat. “…A wedding ring?”

She was shaking all over now, not just her hands. Ingrid doubted it had much of anything to do with the cold.

“I don’t think anyone is going to take Sylvain seriously if we refuse to confirm what he said.” And _that _had been twisting the knife to say, so deep that Ingrid couldn’t even see the hilt, but it was the only way to let Dorothea out with her reputation at least mostly intact. She could do no less. “Especially considering the way he and Felix were acting before he shouted it out. If you want to give the ring back to me, you can.”

And she’d been wrong: that _last _bit was twisting the knife to say. The previous contender was just a pinprick by comparison.

_I can do no less but offer this._

“I didn’t say that!” The vehemence of Dorothea’s voice as she fired her retort made Ingrid jump slightly. It seemed to have taken Dorothea aback as well; she stiffened, then her shoulders sagged. She took a deep, shuddering breath. “I didn’t say that, Ingrid. Just…” She smiled, and why was it that even her obviously forced smiles looked pretty, if only an iota of effort was put into them? “…Just tell me, next time, if you give me something with that kind of intent. I don’t want to find out about it on my own; I swear, I felt like my soul was leaving my body when Sylvain said that.”

“I will. I promise.”

Ingrid thought that the conversation might end there. Thought she might be left alone sitting on these steps as Dorothea went back inside to finish her lunch, or get on with whatever tasks she’d been assigned today. Ingrid knew _she _needed to get on both.

_Well, I’ve made a thorough fool of myself. I don’t think I could have done any better if Sylvain hadn’t decided to interfere again._

Not that this got him out of his sparring session.

“Ingrid…” No departure, no rejection, not yet (Ingrid knew it could come later. It could always come later). Dorothea rubbed her thumb hard against the patch of skin between her eyebrows, as if trying to smooth away a headache. “Ingrid, I don’t think you’ve told me. What do you want?”

What did it say about her, that the question threw her? Ingrid could reflect on that later.

“I…” It really had been a long time, though, since she had last given this sort of thing any serious thought. Not that Ingrid thought she ever had given it any serious thought. All the stories ended at ‘and they lived happily ever after,’ for the stories that ended happily ever after. Very few of them alluded to what it was to build a _life _together. “I’m not sure. You said I was giving you mixed signals; I couldn’t really tell about you, either. I didn’t give it that much thought.

“I… want to be with you. I want to stand at your side in hardship, to share in your triumphs. I want to protect you, to give you aid in your goals, whatever they might be—“ and if those goals included finding a wealthy husband, finding someone who would want to marry Dorothea because they loved her, would that resolve hold? Or would Ingrid fall to jealousy? She wished she could say she knew her heart to be pure enough to disavow the latter, but the thought by itself was enough pierce her heart with a bitter thorn. “—and…” Ingrid shook her head, her mouth twisting sourly. “I remember what you said that night, after you told me that we were being followed. I’d like to ensure that anyone who thinks to make you hide in a shop to avoid them regrets their choices _severely_. I—“

Dorothea laughed suddenly.

Heat flooded into Ingrid’s face as her eyes shot to Dorothea’s. “What?”

Dorothea smiled gently, reaching out to brush her hand against the side of Ingrid’s jaw, thumb against her cheek and fingers curling under her jaw. This, as you can imagine, only caused Ingrid’s face to grow even hotter. “Oh, Ingrid.” She raised an eyebrow, smirking suggestively. “Keep talking like that, and I might just kiss you.”

Dorothea had spoken of feeling like her soul was leaving her body. Ingrid… suddenly knew exactly how she felt.

Fires of Ailell, it wasn’t like she had anything left to lose:

“If you’re offering,” she croaked, “I’m hardly going to say no.”

And Dorothea chose to take this in immediate earnest.

Her lips were warm and satin-soft against Ingrid’s own chapped lips, and Ingrid wasn’t going to be content with just _being _kissed for more than about half a second. She pressed her hand to Dorothea’s shoulder and surged forward, but the moment she leaned in she was greeted with a harsh clink of teeth and she seemed to have judged her angle wrong, because she was pretty sure people weren’t supposed to jam their noses together when they were kissing. Dorothea pulled away, laughing softly.

“Wow.” Dorothea pressed her hand over her mouth, laughter shimmering in her voice. “You are really new to this whole kissing thing, aren’t you?”

“I’ve had my family to think about!” Ingrid protested, though the heat in her face couldn’t seem to find its way to her voice. “I… I can’t just go kissing people; people would talk!”

Dorothea’s hand moved to Ingrid’s hair, threading her fingers in, nails brushing against skin. The sensation was almost enthralling, a jolt like lightning. “Oh, yeah?” Her voice pitched low, a smooth rumble that shivered across Ingrid’s already sensitive skin. “What was that just now, then?”

Ingrid couldn’t even piece together an intelligible response, contenting herself (for a certain value of ‘content’) with mumbling incoherently while her face got hotter and hotter.

_That felt good_.

And when no thoughts of how it _shouldn’t _have felt good came chasing after, Ingrid felt something else start to unravel inside of her, like the breaking of a chain.

“Ingrid…” Dorothea sighed, and though the traces of her smile could still be made out, the laughter was gone from her voice. “I don’t know if I _love _you, but I do _like _you, and I care about you. So tell me the truth.” She peered intently into Ingrid’s face. “If we go back there and tell people that we’re in a relationship, is that going to cause trouble for you?”

There were few things in Ingrid’s life that didn’t cause her trouble, and these days, she felt as if much of them rose from within. She wondered, at odd moments, if the next time she went into battle, she’d see red again, and just hack, hack, hack away at an enemy until someone was dragging her away from the battlefield or she was shot full of arrows. She wondered if she would go to bed a woman and awake a beast with coarse fur and dagger-claws of adamant. She wondered if her weakness would swallow her and leave behind a shell of a person fit for nothing but being the empty vessel she feared becoming.

“I think I’m always going to have my share of troubles,” Ingrid told her, “and if this gives me trouble, too, I’ll weather it as I weather the others. To walk with you, I’ll weather any trouble that arises as a result.” _What if, what if, what if. _A smile broke over her face, lopsided and toothless, but cut crisply in the shape of her dreams. “What do you say?”

Dorothea took her hands in her own and pulled her up to her feet. That was all the answer Ingrid needed.


End file.
